It was on a grey day of October, at the time when they strip the bark of these trees, to make corks of it. They strip them thus from the foot to the first branches, and the denuded trunk becomes red, a blood red as of a flayed limb. They have grotesque and twisted shapes; the look of maimed creatures writhing in epileptic fits, and I suddenly fancied myself transported into a forest of tormented beings, a bleeding and Dantesque forest of hell, where men had roots, where bodies deformed by torture, resembled trees, where life ebbed incessantly, in never-ending torment by these bleeding wounds, which produced upon me the tension of the nerves and faintness that sensitive people feel at the sudden sight of blood, or the unexpected shock of a man crushed, or fallen from a roof. And this emotion was so keen, this sensation so vivid, that I imagined I heard distracting cries and plaints, distant and innumerable; I touched one of these trees, to reassure my fainting spirit, and I fancied, I beheld my hand, as I drew it back, covered with blood. To-day they are cured--till the next barking. At length the road appears, passing near the farm which has sheltered the long happiness of the non-commissioned officer of hussars, and the Colonel's daughter. From afar, I recognize the old man walking among the vines. So much the better; the wife will be alone in the house. The servant was washing in front of the door. "Your mistress is here," I said. [Illustration 057] She replied, with a singular look, in the accent of the south: "No, sir; since six months she is no more." "She is dead?" "Yes, sir." "And of what?" The woman hesitated, then muttered: "She is dead--dead, I tell you." "But of what?" "Of a fall, then!" "A fall! where from?" "From the window." I gave her a few pence. "Tell me about it," I said. No doubt she strongly wished to talk of it, no doubt, too, she had often repeated this history for the last six months, for she retailed it at great length, as a story well-known by heart and invariable in its repetition. Then I learnt that for thirty years, the old deaf man had had a mistress in the neighbouring village, and that his wife having learnt this by chance from a passing carter, who spoke of it without knowing who she was, rushed panting and bewildered to the attic, and there hurled herself from the window, not perhaps with deliberate purpose, but impelled by the torture of the horrible agony caused by her discovery, which goaded her forward in an irresistible gust of passion, like a whip lashing and cutting. She had flown up the staircase, burst open the door, and without knowing, without being able to stop her headlong speed, had continued to run straight ahead and had leaped into empty space. _He_ had known nothing of it; he did not know even now; he would never know, because he was deaf. His wife was dead, that was all. All the world must die some time or other!