antiquity. It stands there,
alone, high as a mountain, a dead queen, but still the queen of the
valleys stretched out beneath it. You go up by a slope planted with
firs, then you enter a narrow gate, and stop at the foot of the walls,
in the first inclosure, in full view of the entire country.

Inside there are ruined halls, crumbling stairways, unknown cavities,
dungeons, walls cut through in the middle, vaulted roofs held up one
knows not how, and a mass of stones and crevices, overgrown with grass,
where animals glide in and out.

I was exploring this ruin alone.

Suddenly I perceived behind a bit of wall a being, a kind of phantom,
like the spirit of this ancient and crumbling habitation.

I was taken aback with surprise, almost with fear, when I recognized the
old lady whom I had seen twice.

She was weeping, with big tears in her eyes, and held her handkerchief
in her hand.

I turned around to go away, when she spoke to me, apparently ashamed to
have been surprised in her grief.

"Yes, monsieur, I am crying. That does not happen often to me."

"Pardon me, madame, for having disturbed you," I stammered, confused,
not knowing what to say. "Some misfortune has doubtless come to you."

"Yes. No--I am like a lost dog," she murmured, and began to sob, with
her handkerchief over her eyes.

Moved by these contagious tears, I took her hand, trying to calm her.
Then brusquely she told me her history, as if no longer ably to bear her
grief alone.

"Oh! Oh! Monsieur--if you knew--the sorrow in which I live--in what
sorrow.

"Once I was happy. I have a house down there--a home. I cannot go back
to it any more; I shall never go back to it again, it is too hard to
bear.

"I have a son. It is he! it is he! Children don't know. Oh, one has
such a short time to live! If I should see him now I should perhaps
not recognize him. How I loved him? How I loved him! Even before he
was born, when I felt him move. And after that! How I have kissed and
caressed and cherished him! If you knew how many nights I have passed in
watching him sleep, and how many in thinking of him. I was crazy about
him. When he was eight years old his father sent him to boarding-school.
That was the end. He no longer belonged to me. Oh, heavens! He came to
see me every Sunday. That was all!

"He went to college in Paris. Then he came only four times a year,
and every time I was astonished to see how he had changed, to find him
taller without ha