a queer,
ridiculous-looking old woman breakfasting alone at the end table.

She was at least seventy years old, tall, skinny, and angular, and her
white hair was puffed around her temples in the old-fashioned style. She
was dressed like a traveling Englishwoman, in awkward, queer clothing,
like a person who is indifferent to dress. She was eating an omelet and
drinking water.

Her face was peculiar, with restless eyes and the expression of one with
whom fate has dealt unkindly. I watched her, in spite of myself,
thinking: "Who is she? What is the life of this woman? Why is she
wandering alone through these mountains?"

She paid and rose to leave, drawing up over her shoulders an astonishing
little shawl, the two ends of which hung over her arms. From a corner of
the room she took an alpenstock, which was covered with names traced with
a hot iron; then she went out, straight, erect, with the long steps of a
letter-carrier who is setting out on his route.

A guide was waiting for her at the door, and both went away. I watched
them go down the valley, along the road marked by a line of high wooden
crosses. She was taller than her companion, and seemed to walk faster
than he.

Two hours later I was climbing the edge of the deep funnel that incloses
Lake Pavin in a marvelous and enormous basin of verdure, full of trees,
bushes, rocks, and flowers. This lake is so round that it seems as if the
outline had been drawn with a pair of compasses, so clear and blue that
one might deem it a flood of azure come down from the sky, so charming
that one would like to live in a but on the wooded slope which dominates
this crater, where the cold, still water is sleeping. The Englishwoman
was standing there like a statue, gazing upon the transparent sheet down
in the dead volcano. She was straining her eyes to penetrate below the
surface down to the unknown depths, where monstrous trout which have
devoured all the other fish are said to live. As I was passing close by
her, it seemed to me that two big tears were brimming her eyes. But she
departed at a great pace, to rejoin her guide, who had stayed behind in
an inn at the foot of the path leading to the lake.

I did not see her again that day.

The next day, at nightfall, I came to the chateau of Murol. The old
fortress, an enormous tower standing on a peak in the midst of a large
valley, where three valleys intersect, rears its brown, uneven, cracked
surface into the sky; it is r