e rise up from the
bottom of the depth to which I had descended.

Ledantec was standing in front of me, his face convulsed with horror,
his hair standing on end and his eyes staring out of his head, and he
shouted to me:--

"Let us escape! Let us escape!" Whereupon I opened my eyes wide, and
found myself lying on the ground, in a room into which daylight was
shining. I saw some rags hanging against the wall, two chairs, a broken
jug lying on the floor by my side, and in a corner a wretched bed on
which a woman was lying, who was no doubt dead, for her head was hanging
over the side, and her long white hair reached almost to my feet.

With a bound I was up, like Ledantec.

"What!" I said to him, while my teeth chattered: "Did you kill her?"

"No, no," he replied. "But that makes no difference; let us be off."

I felt completely sober by that time, but I did think that he was still
suffering somewhat from the effects of last night's drunk; otherwise,
why should he wish to escape? while the remains of pity for the
unfortunate woman forced me to say:--

"What is the matter with her? If she is ill, we must look after her."

And I went to the wretched bed, in order to put her head back on the
pillow, but I discovered that she was neither dead nor ill, but only
sound asleep, and I also noticed that she was quite young. She still
wore that idiotic smile, but her teeth were her own and those of a girl.
Her smooth skin and her firm bust showed that she was not more than
sixteen; perhaps not so much.

"There! You see it, you can see it!" Ledantec said. "Let us be off."

He tried to drag me out, and he was still drunk; I could see it by his
feverish movements, his trembling hands and his nervous looks. Then he
implored me and said:--

"I slept beside the old woman; but she is not old. Look at her; look at
her; yes, she is old after all!"

And he lifted up her long hair by handfuls; it was like handfuls of
white silk, and then he added, evidently in a sort of delirium, which
made me fear an attack of _delirium tremens_: "To think that I have
begotten children, three, four children. Who knows how many children,
all in one night! And they were born immediately, and have grown up
already! Let us be off."

Decidedly it was an attack of madness. Poor Ledantec! What could I do
for him? I took his arm and tried to calm him, but he thought that I was
going to try and make him go to bed with her again, and he pushed me
away a