found in her pocket, written at the last moment,
requested that her body be buried in the village in which she had passed
the last days of her life. A sad suspicion weighed on my heart. Was it
not on my account that she wished to be laid to rest in this place?

"Toward evening all the female gossips of the locality came to view the
remains of the defunct, but I would not allow a single person to enter. I
wanted to be alone, and I watched beside her all night.

"I looked at the corpse by the flickering light of the candles, at this
unhappy woman, unknown to us all, who had died in such a lamentable
manner and so far away from home. Had she left no friends, no relations
behind her? What had her infancy been? What had been her life? Whence had
she come thither alone, a wanderer, lost like a dog driven from home?
What secrets of sufferings and of despair were sealed up in that
unprepossessing body, in that poor body whose outward appearance had
driven from her all affection, all love?

"How many unhappy beings there are! I felt that there weighed upon that
human creature the eternal injustice of implacable nature! It was all
over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which
sustains the greatest outcasts to wit, the hope of being loved once!
Otherwise why should she thus have concealed herself, fled from the face
of others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so passionately,
everything living that was not a man?

"I recognized the fact that she believed in a God, and that she hoped to
receive compensation from the latter for all the miseries she had
endured. She would now disintegrate and become, in turn, a plant. She
would blossom in the sun, the cattle would browse on her leaves, the
birds would bear away the seeds, and through these changes she would
become again human flesh. But that which is called the soul had been
extinguished at the bottom of the dark well. She suffered no longer. She
had given her life for that of others yet to come.

"Hours passed away in this silent and sinister communion with the dead. A
pale light at length announced the dawn of a new day; then a red ray
streamed in on the bed, making a bar of light across the coverlet and
across her hands. This was the hour she had so much loved. The awakened
birds began to sing in the trees.

"I opened the window to its fullest extent and drew back the curtains
that the whole heavens might look in upon us, and, bending ove