er of
what it gets. Rowing inshore to stop his wife's cries, Cambremer found
her half-dead. The two brothers couldn't carry her the whole distance
home, so they had to put her into the boat which had just served to kill
her son, and they rowed back round the tower by the channel of Croisic.
Well, well! the belle Brouin, as they called her, didn't last a week.
She died begging her husband to burn that accursed boat. Oh, he did it!
As for him, he became I don't know what; he staggered about like a man
who can't carry his wine. Then he went away and was gone ten days, and
after he returned he put himself where you saw him, and since he has
been there he has never said one word."

The fisherman related this history rapidly and more simply than I can
write it. The lower classes make few comments as they relate a thing;
they tell the fact that strikes them, and present it as they felt it.
This tale was made as sharply incisive as the blow of an axe.

"I shall not go to Batz," said Pauline, when we came to the upper shore
of the lake.

We returned to Croisic by the salt marshes, through the labyrinth of
which we were guided by our fisherman, now as silent as ourselves. The
inclination of our souls was changed. We were both plunged into gloomy
reflections, saddened by the recital of a drama which explained the
sudden presentiment which had seized us on seeing Cambremer. Each of us
had enough knowledge of life to divine all that our guide had not told
of that triple existence. The anguish of those three beings rose up
before us as if we had seen it in a drama, culminating in that of the
father expiating his crime. We dared not look at the rock where sat the
fatal man who held the whole countryside in awe. A few clouds dimmed
the skies; mists were creeping up from the horizon. We walked through a
landscape more bitterly gloomy than any our eyes had ever rested on,
a nature that seemed sickly, suffering, covered with salty crust, the
eczema, it might be called, of earth. Here, the soil was mapped out in
squares of unequal size and shape, all encased with enormous ridges or
embankments of gray earth and filled with water, to the surface of which
the salt scum rises. These gullies, made by the hand of man, are again
divided by causeways, along which the laborers pass, armed with long
rakes, with which they drag this scum to the bank, heaping it on
platforms placed at equal distances when the salt is fit to handle.

For two hours