ay forever the one who a few
moments before was a woman of sumptuous charm upon whom men could not
look unmoved. The four planks now guarded merely bloody rags, mutilated
flesh, broken bones.

The vehicle went to the cemetery of Vincennes, to the corner in which
the executed were buried.... Not a flower, not an inscription, not a
cross. The lawyer himself could not be sure of finding her burial place
if at any time it was necessary to seek it.... Such was the last scene
in the career of this luxurious and pleasure-loving creature!... Thus
had that body gone to dissolution in an unknown hole in the ground like
any abandoned beast of burden!...

"She was good," said her defender, "and yet at the same time, she was a
criminal. Her education was to blame. Poor woman!... They had brought
her up to live in riches, and riches had always fled before her."

Then in his last lines the old _maitre_ said with melancholy, "She died
thinking of you and a little of me.... We have been the last men of her
existence."

This reading left Ulysses in a mournful state of stupefaction. Freya
was no longer living!... He was no longer running the danger of seeing
her appear on his ship at whatever port he might touch!...

The duality of his sentiments again surged up with violent
contradiction.

"It was a good thing!" said the sailor, "how many men have died through
her fault!... Her execution was inevitable. The sea must be cleared of
such bandits."

And at the same time the remembrance of the delights of Naples, of that
long imprisonment in a harem pervaded with unlimited sensuousness was
reborn in his mind. He saw her in all the majesty of her marvelous
body, just as when she was dancing or leaping from side to side of the
old salon. And now this form, molded by nature in a moment of
enthusiasm, was no longer in existence.... It was nothing but a mass of
liquid flesh and pestilent pulp!...

He recalled her kiss, that kiss that had so electrified him, making him
sink down and down through an ocean of ecstasy, like a castaway,
content with his fate.... And he would never know her more!... And her
mouth, with its perfume of cinnamon and incense, of Asiatic forests
haunted with sensuousness and intrigue, was now ...! Ah, misery!

Suddenly he saw the profile of the dead woman with one eye turned
toward him, graciously and malignly, just as the "eye of the morning"
must have looked at its mistress while uncoiling her mysterious dances