The General Hospital, so called because illness, old age, and wretchedness chose it for their meeting place, was an enormous building, covering, like all old constructions, a great deal of space, and lodging a very few people. Before the door was a little pent-roof where, when it was fine, the convalescent, and the able-bodied gathered together. In fact, the hospital did not only house those who were sick; it included also poor folks, handed over to public charity, and even guests who for an insignificant capital lived there in a mean fashion, but without care. All that company used to come, at each ray of the sun, to the shade of the pent-roof, and seat themselves on old straw-bottomed chairs. It was the most lively spot in the little town. As we passed, my friend Guyomar and I, we greeted them and received their greeting: for though we were very young, we were already considered as being in Holy Orders. That seemed natural to us: one thing alone excited our surprise. Although we were too inexperienced to see in it anything that might have been inferred from a knowledge of life, there was among the poor folk at the hospital, one person before whom we never passed without a certain astonishment.

This was an old maid of forty-five, wearing on her head a large hood of a shape impossible to classify. Usually she was almost motionless, with a sombre, distracted air, her eyes lustreless and fixed. When she saw us those dead eyes came to life. She followed us with a strange look, sometimes gentle and sad, sometimes hard and almost ferocious. Turning round, we would find her expression cruel and angry. We looked at each other without comprehension. This interrupted our conversation and threw a cloud over our gaiety. She did not make us precisely afraid. She was considered mad: now, madmen in those days were not treated in the cruel way that administrative custom has invented since. Far from shutting them up, they were allowed to wander about all day. The village of Tréguier had usually a great number of madmen: like all dreamy races, who wear themselves out in the pursuit of an ideal, the Bretons of those parts, when they are not sustained by an energetic will, slip too easily into a state intermediate between drunkenness and madness, which is often only the aberrations of an unsatisfied heart.

The madwoman of the General Hospital spoke to nobody. Nobody gave her a thought; her story was evidently forgotten. She never said a single word to us: but her wild haggard eyes affected us profoundly, disturbed us. I have often thought since of this enigma without being able to explain it. I found the key to it eight years ago when my mother, who had reached the age of eight-five without infirmities, was smitten with a cruel illness which slowly undermined her.

My mother belonged by her sentiments and memories altogether to this old world. She spoke Breton admirably, and knew all the sailors’ proverbs, and a crowd of things that to one in the world knows to- day. Everything in her was knit to the people, and her native wit gave a surprising life to the long stories which she told and which she was almost the only one to remember.

One day the conversation turned on the General Hospital. She told me all its history.

‘And that madwoman,’ I said to her, ‘who was usually sitting under the pent-roof, and who frightened Guyomar and me?’

She thought a moment to recollect of whom I spoke, and went on briskly.

‘Ah, that woman, my son, was the daughter of the flax pounder.’

‘What’s a flax pounder?’

‘I have never told you that story. You see, my boy, that isn’t understood nowadays: it’s a story of too long ago. Since I have come to this parish of yours, there are things I dare not speak of…These country nobility were so respected! I have always considered that they were the real nobles. Ah! if I said that to these Parisians they would laugh. They recognize nothing but their own Paris; I find them fundamentally limited. No, you cannot realize any more how those old country nobles were looked up to, though they were poor.’

She stopped a little while and then went on.

‘You remember the little village of Trédarzec, whose steeple we could see from the turret of our house? Less than a quarter of a league from the village, made up at that time almost entirely of the church, the village hall and the parsonage, rose the manor-house of Kermelle. It was a manor-house like so many others, a well-kept farm, old in appearance, surrounded by a long high wall of a beautiful grey colour. The courtyard was approached by a large arched gate surmounted by a tiled roof, at the side of which was a smaller door for everyday use. A dovecot, a turret, two or three well-built windows, almost like church windows, indicated a nobleman’s house, one of those old castles which were inhabited before the revolution by a class of people whose character and habits it is nowadays impossible to imagine.

‘These country nobles were peasants like the others, but chief of the others. In old times there was only one of them in each parish; they were the leaders of the population: no one contested their right, and they were accorded great honour. But already, about the time of the Revolution, they had become scarce. The peasants considered them as the lay chiefs of the parish, as the priest was the ecclesiastical chief. The one who lived at Trédarzec, about whom I am telling you, was a fine old man, tall and vigorous, like a young man, with a frank honest face. He wore his hair long, held up by a comb, and only let it down on Sundays when he was taking communion. I see him still (he used to come to our house at Tréguier), serious, grave, rather sad, for he was the only one of his kind. These petty pedigreed nobility had disappeared for the most part: the rest had long ago gone to live in town. All the countryside adored him. He had a pew set apart for him in church: every Sunday he was seen there, seated in the first row of the faithful, with his old-fashioned attire and his ceremonial gloves, which reached almost to his elbow. At the moment of communion he started at the bottom of the choir, loosened his hair, laid his gloves on a little credence table set ready for him near the screen, and crossed the choir, alone, without abating a jot of his high carriage. Nobody went to the communion table until he was back in his place, and until he had finished pulling on his gauntlets again.

‘He was very poor: but he hid it as a duty to his rank. Those country nobility had formerly certain privileges which helped them to live a little differently from the peasants: all that had gone with the times. Kermelle was in very embarrassed circumstances. His rank as a nobleman forbade him to work in the fields: he shut himself up in his house all day, and busied himself behind closed doors with an occupation which did not require open air. When flax is soaked it has to undergo a sort of decortication which only permits the textile fibre to remain. It was this task in which poor Kermelle considered he could engage without loss of dignity. No one saw him: professional honour was saved; but everybody knew it, and as in those days everybody had a nickname, he was soon known in the countryside under the name of the flax pounder. This nickname, as usually is the case, took the place of his real name, and it was in this fashion that he was universally designated.

‘He was like a living patriarch. You would laugh if I told you what it was with, that the flax pounder supplemented the insufficient remuneration of his poor little trade. People believed that, as chief, he was the depositary of the power of his blood, that he possessed in a high degree the gifts of his race, and that he could, by means of his saliva and the touch of his hands, raise it up when it was weakened. They were persuaded that, to accomplish cures of this kind, an enormous number of quarterings of nobility were needed, and he alone had them. His house was surrounded, on certain days, by people come from twenty leagues round about. When a child was late in walking, with feeble limbs, it was brought to him. He moistened his finger in his saliva, traced this anointing on the child’s loins which were thereby strengthened. What do you expect? People had faith in those days: men were so simple and so good! For nothing in the world would he have expected payment, and since the people who came, were too poor to pay the debt in money, they would offer him as a present a dozen eggs, a bit of fat bacon, a handful of linen, a basketful of potatoes, a pat of butter, some fruit. He accepted. The town nobility jeered at him, but they were very wrong. He knew the countryside: he was the soul and the incarnation of it.

‘At the time of the Revolution, he emigrated to Jersey: one doesn’t quite see why; certainly no one would have done him any harm, but the nobility of Tréguier said to him that the king commanded it, and he went away with the others. He returned early, found his old house, which no one had wanted to occupy, in the state he had left it. At the time of the indemnities people tried to persuade him that he had lost something, and that there was more than one good reason for putting in a claim. The other nobles were annoyed at seeing him so poor, and would have liked to give him a hand; this simple soul did not enter into the arguments that they put before him. When they asked him to declare what he had lost. “I had nothing,” he said, “I couldn’t have lost anything.” Nobody succeeded in getting any other answer from him, and he remained poor as before.

‘His wife died, I think, in Jersey. He had a daughter, who was born about the time of the emigrations. She was a fine looking, big girl (you have only seen her withered); she had nature’s own sap, a splendid complexion, pure strong blood. She ought to have been married young, but it was impossible. These bankrupt little nobles of a little town who are good for nothing, and who are not worth a quarter of the old country nobility, would have nothing to do with her for their sons. His principles prevented him from marrying her to a peasant. The poor girl stayed thus, hung up like a soul in torment. She had no place here below. Her father was the last of his race, and she seemed wantonly cast on the earth, and could find there no corner to shelter in. She was good tempered and docile. She was a beautiful body, almost without a soul. Instinct in her was everything. She would have been an excellent mother. In default of marriage, she should have been made a nun: rules and austerities would have calmed her: but it is probable that the father was not rich enough to pay the dowry to the church, and his position did not allow of his making her a lay sister. Poor girl! cast into the wrong road, she was condemned to perish there.

‘She was born upright and good, she had never any doubt as to her duty: she had no other fault than that of having blood and veins. No young man of the village would have dared to be indiscreet with her, so much her father was respected. The feeling of her superiority kept her from turning to the young peasants: for them, she was a lady: they did not think of her. The poor girl lived thus in an absolute solitude. There was nobody in the house except a young boy of twelve or thirteen, a nephew of Kermelle, whom the latter had received into his house, and whom the vicar, worthy man that he was, taught what he knew: Latin.

‘The church was the sole diversion of the poor child. She was pious by nature, although too little intelligent to understand anything of the mysteries of our religion. The vicar, a good priest, very attached to his duties, had for the flax pounder the respect which was his due; the hours which were left over from his breviary and the cares of his ministry, were passed at the latter’s house. He educated the young nephew; for the girl he had those reserved manners which our Breton ecclesiastics have with “persons of the sex” as they call them. He greeted her, asked how she was getting on, but never talked with her if it were not about insignificant matters. The wretched girl fell in love with him deeper and deeper. The vicar was the only person of her own rank that she saw, if it is permissible to talk like that. This young priest was, besides that, a very attractive person. Along with the exquisite modesty which his whole outward appearance breathed, he had a sad, resigned, discreet air. You felt that he had a heart and feelings, but that a principle more lofty dominated them, and was transformed in him to something higher. You know the infinite charm of some of our good Breton ecclesiastics. Women feel that very keenly. This invincible attachment to a vow, which is in its way a homage to their power, emboldens them, attracts them, flatters them. The priest becomes for them a safe brother who has laid aside, because of them, his sex and its joys. Thence springs a sentiment in which is mingled confidence, pity, regret, gratitude. Let the priest marry, and you will destroy one of the most necessary elements, one of the most delicate graduations, of our society. The women will protest; for there is only one thing which a woman sets even above being loved, that is, that importance should be attached to love. Women are never more flatted than in showing them that they are feared. The Church, in imposing chastity as the first duty of its ministers, caresses feminine vanity in its most tender spot.

‘So the poor girl was seized with a deep love for the vicar, which soon took possession of her entire being. The virtuous and mystic race to which she belonged does not know the frenzy which overturns obstacles, and which accounts it to have nothing if it has not all. Oh, she was content with really very little. If he should only acknowledge her existence, she would have been happy. She did not ask a look from him: a thought would have sufficed. The vicar was naturally her confessor; there was no other priest in the parish. The customs of the Catholic confessional, so beautiful but so dangerous, strangely excited her imagination. Once a week, on Saturday, it was an inexpressible sweetness for her to be half an hour alone with him, as if face to face with God, to see him, to feel him filling his role of God, to breathe his breath, to undergo the sweet humiliation of his reprimands, of telling him her most intimate thoughts, her scruples, her apprehensions. Yet you must not think that she abused it. Very rarely does a pious woman dare to use the confessional for a love confidence. She may enjoy it greatly; she risks giving herself up to feelings which are not without danger; but the fact that such feelings are always a little mystic, is irreconcilable with the horror of sacrilege. In any case our poor girl was so shy, that the words would have died on her lips. Her passion was a silent, intimate, devouring fire. Feeling like that, to see him every day, him, handsome, young, always busied with his majestic functions, officiating with dignity amid a people bent before him, minister, judge, and director of her own soul! It was too much. The unhappy child’s head could not stand it; she lost her way. Disorders, more and more serious, arose in this strong organism which could not tolerate being turned from its path. Her old father attributed to a certain weakness of mind that which was the result of the inner ravages of impossible dreams in a heart which love had pierced from side to side.

‘Like an impetuous river which, meeting an insurmountable obstacle, renounces its direct course and twists aside, the poor girl, having no means of telling her love to the man she loved, fell back on trifles. To hold his attention an instant, not to be any chance comer in his eyes, to be allowed to do him little services, to be able to imagine that she was useful to him: that was enough for her. “My God, who knows?” she could say to herself, “he is a man after all: perhaps in his heart he is touched, and is only held back by the discipline of his calling.” All these efforts met an iron barrier, a wall of ice. The vicar did not swerve from an absolute coldness. She was the daughter of the man he respected the most; but she was a woman. Oh! if he had avoided her, if he had treated her roughly, that would have been a triumph for her, and a proof that she had touched his heart; but this uniform politeness, this resolution not to see the most obvious signs of love, was something terrible. He did not reprove her, he did not hide from her: he did not depart from the unshakeable decision he had made of not admitting her existence except as an abstraction.

‘At the end of some time, this became a cruelty. Repulsed, desperate, the poor girl fell ill; her eyes wandered, but she kept guard on herself; in its entirety nobody saw her secret, she ate her heart out alone. “What!” she would say to herself, “Shall I not be able to arrest his glance for a moment? He will not admit to me that I exist? I shall be for him, whatever I do, only a shadow, a phantom, a soul, along with a hundred others? His love, that would be too much to desire: but his attention, his looks? To be his equal, he so clever, so near to God, I would know not to lay claim to that: to be a mother by him, oh, that would be a sacrilege: but to be his, to be a Martha to him, the first of his servants, charged with the modest duties which I am quite fit for, and in that way have all in common with him, all, that is to say, his house, that which matters to the humble woman who has not been initiated to higher thoughts, oh, that would be paradise!”

‘She stayed whole afternoons motionless, seated in her chair, enchained to this fixed idea. She saw him, imagined herself with him, surrounding him with attentions, looking after his home, kissing the hem of his robe. She repelled those insensate dreams: but after giving herself up to them for hours, she was pale, half dead. She existed no longer for those who surrounded her. Her father ought to have seen it: but what could the simple old man do against an evil, the very thought of which his honest soul could not conceive?

‘Things continued so for perhaps a year. It is probable that the vicar noticed nothing; our priests live in this respect so conventionally, in a sort of resolution not to see anything. This admirable chastity only excited the imagination of the poor child. Love in her case became a cult, a pure adoration, an exaltation. She found thus a relative repose. Her imagination led her towards inoffensive games; she liked to tell herself that she was working for him, that she was busy doing something for him. She was at the stage of dreaming while wide awake, of executing like a somnambulist acts of which she was only half aware. Night and day she had only one thought; she saw herself serving him, caring for him, counting his linen, busy with all the things that were too far beneath him for him to think about. All these chimæras finished by taking shape, and led her to a strange act which cannot be explained except by the state of madness in which she decidedly had been for some time.’

What follows, in fact, will be incomprehensible if one does not keep in one’s mind certain traits of the Breton character. What is most peculiar among the peoples of Brittany is their attitude to love. Love among them is a tender, deep, affectionate sentiment, much more than a passion. It is an inner voluptuousness which wears out and kills. Nothing is more unlike the fire of the southern peoples. The paradise they dream of is fresh, green, without transports. No race can count so many deaths from love: suicide is rare: what predominates is slow consumption. The case occurs frequently among the young Breton conscripts. Incapable of finding distraction in vulgar, venal attachments, they succumb to a sort of indeterminate languor. Homesickness is only the outward manifestation: the truth is that love with them is associated in an indissoluble way with the village, the church steeple, the evening angelus-bell, the cherished countryside. The passionate southerner kills his rival, kills the object of his passion. The sentiment we are speaking of kills only him who feels it, and that is why the Breton race is a race that has no difficulty in being chaste: through its fine lively imagination it creates for itself an aerial world which suffices. The true poetry of such a love is the Spring song of the Song of Songs, an admirable poem, much more voluptuous than passionate. ‘Hiems transiit: imber abiit et recessit; vox turturis audita est in terra nostra. Surge, amica mea, et veni!’ ‘For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

My mother continued thus:

‘Everything is at bottom only a great illusion, and what proves it, is that, in many cases, nothing is easier than to dupe nature by mimicry which it cannot distinguish from reality. I shall never forget how the daughter of Marzin, the miller of the Grande Rue, insane too through suppression of the maternal feeling, took a faggot, swaddled it in rags, put a kind of baby’s bonnet on it, and then spent days cuddling it in her arms, this fictitious doll, rocking it to sleep, pressing it to her heart, covering it with kisses. When it was put in the evening in a cradle beside her, she rested quietly till next morning. There are instincts for which the outward appearance is sufficient, and which can be lulled by fictions. Thus the poor Kermelle girl succeeded in realizing her dreams, by doing what she dreamed of. What she dreamed of was life in common with the man she loved, and the life that she shared in spirit was naturally not the life of the priest, it was the life of the house. The poor girl was made for the marriage state. Her madness was a sort of domestic madness, a thwarted housewife’s instinct. She imagined her paradise realized, in seeing herself keeping the house of the man she loved, and since now she did not distinguish very clearly her dreams from reality, she was led to an unbelievable aberration. What of it? These poor madwomen prove by their disorders the holy laws of nature and their inevitability.

‘Her days were spent in hemming linen, and marking it. Now, in her thoughts, this linen was destined for the house she imagined, for this common nest where she would have passed her life at the feet of the man she adored. The hallucination went so far that she marked those sheets, those napkins, with the vicar’s initials: nay, often the vicar’s initials were mingled with her own. She was clever at these pretty woman’s tasks. Her needle went in and out, in and out ceaselessly and for delicious hours she sat spinning, wrapped in her heart’s dreams, believing that he and she were but one. Thus she duped her passion, and found moments of voluptuousness which satisfied her for days on end.

‘The weeks flowed by in this way, in tracing stitch by stitch the letters of the name she loved, marrying it with her own; and this pastime was for her a great consolation. Her hands were always busy for him; these linens sewed by her seemed to be her own self. They would be near him, would touch him, would serve his needs; they would be herself beside him. What joy there was in such a thought! She would be always without him, it is true; but the impossible is the impossible. She would get as near him as was permitted. For a year she savoured thus in imagination her poor little happiness. Alone, her eyes fixed on her work, she was a creature of another world, believing herself his wife in the feeble compass of probability. Hours glided by with a motion slow as her needle: her poor imagination was comforted. And then, she had sometimes some hope: perhaps he would let himself be touched, perhaps a tear would escape him when he discovered this surprise, this mark of so great a love. “He will see how I love him; he will think that it is sweet to be together.” Thus she lost herself for days in her dreams, which usually ended in fits of complete prostration.

‘At last the day came when the set of linen was complete. What to do with it? The idea of forcing him to accept a set, to be her debtor in something, took possession of her absolutely.

‘She wanted, if I dare say so, to steal his thanks, violently to force him to be obliged to her for something. That is what she imagined. It had no common sense in it, it was a trick easily found out: but her reason was asleep, and for a long time now she had only followed the will-o’-the-wisps of her disordered imagination.

‘It was the time of the Christmas festival. After the midnight Mass the vicar had a custom of receiving at his vicarage the mayor and the notables of the village, and serving them a light repast. The vicarage was joined to the church. Besides the principal entrance on the village square, it had two exits: one leading to the inside of the vestry, and so putting the church and the priest in communication: the other, at the end of the garden, led into the fields. The manor-house of Kermelle was about a quarter of a league away. To save the young lad who came to take lessons from the vicar a detour, he had been given the key of this back door. The poor possessed girl secured this key during the midnight Mass, and entered the vicarage. The vicar’s servant, so as to be able to go to the Mass, had laid the table beforehand. Our mad girl rapidly took off all the linen and hid it in the manor-house.

‘When the people came out from Mass, the theft was discovered at once. The excitement was extreme. First of all they were greatly astonished that only the linen had disappeared. The vicar did not want to send his guests away without their repast. At the moment when the embarrassment was most acute, the girl appeared.

‘Oh, this time, you will accept our services, sir. In a quarter of hour our linen will be brought to your house.’

‘Old Kermelle added his entreaties, and the vicar agreed, not suspecting, naturally, such a refinement of duplicity in a creature who was supposed to have only the most limited intelligence.

‘Next day, they thought over this peculiar theft. There was no trace of house-breaking. The principal door of the vicarage and that of the garden were untouched, shut as they should have been. As to the idea that the key entrusted to Kermelle could have served for the execution of the theft, an idea of this kind would have seemed extravagant; it occurred to nobody. There remained the door of the vestry; it seemed obvious that the theft could only have been accomplished through that. The sacristan had been seen in the church all the time of the service. The vestry-woman, on the other hand, had been absent on several occasions; she had been to the fireplace of the vestry to get charcoal for the censers; she had attended to two or three other little matters: suspicion, then, fell on her. She was an excellent woman; her guilt appeared superlatively improbable: but what was to be done against overwhelming coincidences? People couldn’t get away from this reasoning: the thief came in by the vestry door; now the vestry-woman alone could have gone through that door, and it is proved that in reality she did go through it: she admits it herself.

‘At that time the idea was too often yielded to that it was right that every crime should be followed by an arrest. That gave a great idea of the extraordinary sagacity of justice, of the promptitude with which it surveyed and the sureness with which it seized on the scent of a crime. The innocent woman was taken away on foot between two policemen. The effect of the police, when they arrived in the village with their glittering arms and their fine leather straps, was immense. Everybody wept; the vestry-woman alone remained calm, and told them all that she was certain her innocence would be brought to light.

‘In fact, next day or the day after, the impossibility of the supposition that had been made was recognized. The third day the villagers hardly dared to accost one another. Everybody in fact had the same thought, and did not dare to utter it. This thought seemed to them at once obvious and absurd: it is the flax pounder’s key which alone could have been used for the theft. The vicar avoided going out so as not to have to give voice to a suspicion which obsessed him. Up till then he had not examined the linen which had been substituted for his own. His eyes fell by chance on the markings: he was astonished, reflected sadly, could not account for the mystery of the two letters, so impossible was it to divine the queer hallucinations of a poor madwoman.

‘He was plunged in the most gloomy thoughts when he saw the flax pounder enter, pulled up to his full height, and paler than death. The old man remained standing, then burst into tears.

‘ “It is she,” he said, “oh! the unfortunate girl! I ought to have watched her more, entered more into her thoughts; but she was always melancholic and she eluded me.”

‘He revealed the mystery: a moment afterwards, the linen that had been stolen was brought back to the vestry.

‘The poor girl, because of her lack of sense, had hoped that the scandal would die down and that she would quietly enjoy her little loving stratagem. The arrest of the vestry-woman and the excitement which followed it spoiled all her plan. If the moral sense had not been as completely obliterated in her as it was, she would have thought of nothing but freeing the vestry-woman; but she scarcely thought of it. She was plunged in a sort of stupor which had nothing in common with remorse. What crushed her was the obvious miscarriage of her attack on the mind of the vicar. Any other mind than that of a priest would have been touched by the revelation of such a violent love. The vicar remained unaffected. He forbade himself to think of the extraordinary episode, and, as soon as he clearly saw the innocence of the vestry-woman, he slept, said his Mass and his breviary with the same calm as on any other day.

‘The blunder that had been made in arresting the vestry-woman was seen then in its enormity. Without that the affair could have been hushed up. It had not been a real theft: but, after an innocent woman had spent several days in prison for an act qualified as a theft, it was very difficult to leave the real criminal unpunished. Her madness was not obvious: one must admit that this madness was only an inner thing. Before this, it had not occurred to anybody that Kermelle’s daughter was mad. Externally she was like everybody else, except for her almost complete speechlessness. The excuse of mental alienation, then could be contested: besides, the true explanation was so queer, so unbelievable that they hardly dared to bring it forward. Madness not being alleged, the fact of having let the vestry-woman be arrested, was unpardonable. If the theft had only been a game, the author of the joke ought to have cut it short as soon as a third person was its victim. The wretched girl was arrested and taken to St. Brieuc for the Assizes. She did not emerge a moment from her complete prostration; she seemed out of the world. Her dream was finished: the kind of chimæra that she had cherished for some time and which had sustained her, had fallen flat; it existed no longer. Her state had nothing violent about it; it was a mournful silence; then doctors came and judged her with discernment.

At the Assizes, the case was quickly heard. Not a single word could be drawn from her. The flax pounder entered, upright and firm, his face resigned. He approached the prætorian table, and there laid down his gloves, his cross of St. Louis, his sash.

‘ “Gentlemen,” he said, “I can take them up again only if you tell me to. It is she who has done this, and yet she is not a thief. She is ill.”

‘The good man burst into tears: he suffocated.

‘ “That’s enough that’s enough”, was heard from all sides. The solicitor-general showed tact, and without making a speech on a case of erotic aberration, he dropped the accusation.

‘The deliberation of the jury was not long either. Every one wept. When the acquittal was pronounced, the flax pounder took his insignia, retired rapidly, taking his daughter with him, and returned to the village by night.

‘Amid this public scandal the vicar could not avoid learning the truth on a host of points he had hid from himself. He was not affected by them. The obvious facts about which all the world was talking, he feigned to ignore. He did not ask to be removed, the bishop did not dream of proposing it. One would imagine that the first time he saw Kermelle and his daughter, he felt some emotion. He felt none. He betook himself to the manor-house at the hour when he knew he should meet father and daughter.

‘ “You have gravely sinned,” he said to her, “less by your madness, which God will forgive you, than in letting this very good woman be put in prison. An innocent woman, by your fault, has been treated for several days like a thief. The most honest woman of this parish has been led away by the police in the sight of all men. You owe her reparation. On Sunday the vestry-woman will be in her pew, in the last row, near the door of the church: at the credo you will go up to her, and you will lead her by the hand to your seat of honour which she deserve to occupy more than you.”

‘The poor mad girl did mechanically what was enjoined. She was no longer a being with feeling. After this time the flax pounder and his family were hardly seen any more. The manor-house had become a sort of tomb whence no sign of life was heard to issue.

‘The vestry-woman died first. The excitement had been too strong for this simple woman. She had not for a moment doubted Providence; but all that had shaken her. She weakened little by little: she was a saint.

‘The old man lived a few years longer, dying inch by inch, always shut up in his house, no longer talking to the vicar. He went to the church, but he no longer sat in his pew. He was so strong that he held out eight or ten years against this mournful agony.

‘His walks were limited to talking a few steps under the high lime-trees which shaded the manor-house. Now, one day, he saw on the horizon something unusual. It was the tricolour flag which floated on the church tower of Tréguier: the July Revolution had just taken place. When he learned that the king had gone away, he understood more than ever that he had belonged to the end of a world. The professional duty to which he had sacrificed everything, became objectless: he did not regret being attached to too high an ideal of duty: he did not think that he might have enriched himself like the rest: but he lost faith in everything except in God. The Carlist party at Tréguier went about repeating everywhere that this would not last, that the legitimate king would come back. He smiled at these foolish predictions. He died soon after, succoured by the vicar, who explained to him this beautiful passage that is read in the Service for the Dead:

‘ “Be not as the heathen, who have no hope.”

‘After his death his daughter was left without means of support. An arrangement was come to that she should be placed in the hospital. It is there that you saw her. Now, doubtless she is dead too, and others have occupied her bed in the General Hospital.’