om may quiver with the same shudder
and yet remain mute, for people do not mention death any more than they
pronounce certain obscene words. Fear makes it nameless.

I was musing thus while my dear Marguerite knelt sobbing at my feet.
It grieved me sorely to be unable to comfort her by telling her that I
suffered no pain. If death were merely the annihilation of the flesh it
had been foolish of me to harbor so much dread. I experienced a selfish
kind of restfulness in which all my cares were forgotten. My memory had
become extraordinarily vivid. My whole life passed before me rapidly
like a play in which I no longer acted a part; it was a curious and
enjoyable sensation--I seemed to hear a far-off voice relating my own
history.

I saw in particular a certain spot in the country near Guerande, on the
way to Piriac. The road turns sharply, and some scattered pine trees
carelessly dot a rocky slope. When I was seven years old I used to pass
through those pines with my father as far as a crumbling old house,
where Marguerite's parents gave me pancakes. They were salt gatherers
and earned a scanty livelihood by working the adjacent salt marshes.
Then I remembered the school at Nantes, where I had grown up, leading
a monotonous life within its ancient walls and yearning for the broad
horizon of Guerande and the salt marshes stretching to the limitless sea
widening under the sky.

Next came a blank--my father was dead. I entered the hospital as clerk
to the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary diversion:
my Sunday visits to the old house on Piriac road. The saltworks were
doing badly; poverty reigned in the land, and Marguerite's parents were
nearly penniless. Marguerite, when merely a child, had been fond of me
because I trundled her about in a wheelbarrow, but on the morning when I
asked her in marriage she shrank from me with a frightened gesture, and
I realized that she thought me hideous. Her parents, however, consented
at once; they looked upon my offer as a godsend, and the daughter
submissively acquiesced. When she became accustomed to the idea of
marrying me she did not seem to dislike it so much. On our wedding day
at Guerande the rain fell in torrents, and when we got home my bride
had to take off her dress, which was soaked through, and sit in her
petticoats.

That was all the youth I ever had. We did not remain long in our
province. One day I found my wife in tears. She was miserable; life wa