ries of certain springs, certain
woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often which have stirred us
like joyful events. Sometimes our thoughts turn back to a corner in a
forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard filled with flowers, seen but
a single time on some bright day, yet remaining in our hearts like the
image of certain women met in the street on a spring morning in their
light, gauzy dresses, leaving in soul and body an unsatisfied desire
which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that you have just passed by
happiness.

At Virelogne I loved the whole countryside, dotted with little woods and
crossed by brooks which sparkled in the sun and looked like veins
carrying blood to the earth. You fished in them for crawfish, trout and
eels. Divine happiness! You could bathe in places and you often found
snipe among the high grass which grew along the borders of these small
water courses.

I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead
of me, Serval, a hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of
lucerne. I turned round by the thicket which forms the boundary of the
wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.

Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat,
covered with vines, with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a
dead house, with its skeleton standing bare and sinister?

I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day, the good
woman had given me a glass of wine to drink and that Serval had told me
the history of its people. The father, an old poacher, had been killed by
the gendarmes. The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry fellow who
also passed for a fierce slayer of game. People called them "Les
Sauvage."

Was that a name or a nickname?

I called to Serval. He came up with his long strides like a crane.

I asked him:

"What's become of those people?"

This was his story:

When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years
old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not pity
the old woman very much because she had money; they knew it.

She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the
village, on the edge of the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of
the same strain as the men folk--a hardy old woman, tall and thin,
who seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The women of the
fields laugh but little in any case, that is men's bus