wed the bier, some of the inhabitants
of the lodginghouse, perhaps--Simoneau and others, for instance--for
faint whisperings reached my ear. Then I heard a psalm chanted and some
Latin words mumbled by a priest, and afterward I suddenly felt myself
sinking, while the ropes rubbing against the edges of the coffin
elicited lugubrious sounds, as if a bow were being drawn across the
strings of a cracked violoncello. It was the end. On the left side of
my head I felt a violent shock like that produced by the bursting of a
bomb, with another under my feet and a third more violent still on my
chest. So forcible, indeed, was this last one that I thought the lid was
cleft atwain. I fainted from it.

CHAPTER IV

THE NAIL

It is impossible for me to say how long my swoon lasted. Eternity is not
of longer duration than one second spent in nihility. I was no more. It
was slowly and confusedly that I regained some degree of consciousness.
I was still asleep, but I began to dream; a nightmare started into shape
amid the blackness of my horizon, a nightmare compounded of a strange
fancy which in other days had haunted my morbid imagination whenever
with my propensity for dwelling upon hideous thoughts I had conjured up
catastrophes.

Thus I dreamed that my wife was expecting me somewhere--at Guerande, I
believe--and that I was going to join her by rail. As we passed
through a tunnel a deafening roll thundered over our head, and a sudden
subsidence blocked up both issues of the tunnel, leaving our train
intact in the center. We were walled up by blocks of rock in the heart
of a mountain. Then a long and fearful agony commenced. No assistance
could possibly reach us; even with powerful engines and incessant labor
it would take a month to clear the tunnel. We were prisoners there with
no outlet, and so our death was only a question of time.

My fancy had often dwelt on that hideous drama and had constantly varied
the details and touches. My actors were men, women and children; their
number increased to hundreds, and they were ever furnishing me with new
incidents. There were some provisions in the train, but these were soon
exhausted, and the hungry passengers, if they did not actually devour
human flesh, at least fought furiously over the last piece of bread.
Sometimes an aged man was driven back with blows and slowly perished; a
mother struggled like a she-wolf to keep three or four mouthfuls for her
child. In my own compart