My sole diversion is to go on Sunday, after mass, to call on Mme. Gouin, the grocer. Disgust holds me back, but ennui, stronger than disgust, takes me there. There at least we are ourselves again,--all of us together. We gossip, we laugh, we tell stories as we sip our little black-currant cocktails. There we find a little of the illusion of life. The time passes. A few Sundays ago I missed a little woman, with running eyes and a rat-like nose, whom I had seen there previously. I inquire about her. "It is nothing; it is nothing," said the grocer, in a tone to which she tried to impart a certain mystery. "She is sick, then?" "Yes, but it is nothing. In two days it will be all gone." And Mam'zelle Rose looks at me with confirmatory eyes, which seem to say: "Ah, you see, this is a very skilful woman." To-day I have learned at the grocer's that a party of hunters found yesterday, in the forest of Raillon, among the briers and dead leaves, the body of a little girl, horribly outraged. It seems that she was the daughter of a road-laborer. She was known in the neighborhood as the little Claire. She was a little bit simple, but sweet and pretty, and she was not twelve years old! A rich windfall, as you can imagine, for a place like the grocer's shop, where they had to content themselves with telling the same stories week after week. Consequently the tongues rattled famously. According to Rose, always better informed than the others, the little Claire had been cut open with a knife, and her intestines were protruding through the wound. Her neck and throat still bore visible marks of strangling fingers. There was still to be seen in the short heather the trampled and trodden spot where the crime had been committed. It must have happened at least a week ago, for the body was almost entirely decomposed. The assembled domestics relate a heap of things; they remember that the little Claire was always in the woods. In the spring she gathered there jonquils and lilies of the valley and anemones, of which she made pretty bouquets for the ladies of the town; she also went there to look for morels, which she sold on Sunday at the market. In summer there were mushrooms of all sorts, and other flowers. But at this time of year why did she go to the woods, where there was nothing left to pick? One says, discreetly: "Why had the father shown no anxiety regarding the child's disappearance? Perhaps he did it himself?" To which another no less discreetly replies: "But, if he had wanted to do it himself, he had no need to take his daughter to the woods; come now." Mlle. Rose intervenes: "It all looks very suspicious to me." With knowing airs, the airs of one who is in possession of terrible secrets, she goes on in a lower voice, a voice of dangerous confidence: "Oh! I know nothing about it; I make no assertions. But...." And she leaves our curiosity hanging on this "but."