, her disheveled hair,
and I adjusted on her forehead, a novel and singularly formed lock. Then
I took off her dripping wet garments, baring, not without a feeling of
shame, as though I had been guilty of some profanation, her shoulders
and her chest, and her long arms, as slim as the twigs of branches.

I next went to fetch some flowers, corn poppies, blue beetles,
marguerites, and fresh and perfumed herbs, with which to strew her
funeral couch.

I being the only person near her, it was necessary for me to perform the
usual ceremonies. In a letter found in her pocket, written at the last
moment, it was ordered that her body was to be buried in the village in
which she had passed the last days of her life. A frightful thought then
pressed on my heart. Was it not on my account that she wished to be laid
to rest in this place?

Towards the 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 by the corpse the whole
night.

I looked at the corpse by the flickering lights of the candles, this
miserable woman, wholly unknown, who had died lamentably 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 hailed thither
thus, all alone, wanderer, lost like a dog driven from its home? What
secrets of sufferings and despair were sealed up in that disagreeable
body, in that spent, tarnished body--tarnished during the whole of its
existence, that impenetrable envelope which had driven her far away from
all affection, from 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 for
once! Otherwise, why should she thus have concealed herself, fled from
the face of the others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so
passionately, everything living that was not a man?

I recognized, also, that she believed in a God, and that she hoped to
receive compensation from the latter for all the miseries she had
endured. She had begun now to decompose, and to become, in turn, a
plant. She who had blossomed in the sun, was now to be eaten up by the
cattle, carried away in seeds, and flesh of beasts,