"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously for help; but all my neighbors refused to come to my assistance, faithful in that to the habits of civilized man, who never wishes, I know not why, to mix in the affairs of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came, who said that the child had been dead several hours. When, later, we had to disrobe him for burial, the cadaverous rigidity was such that, despairing of bending his limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to remove them." "The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to announce the casualty, looked at me askew and said to me: 'Here's something suspicious,' moved doubtless by an inveterate desire and a professional habit of frightening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty. "There remained a supreme task to perform, the thought of which alone gave me a terrible anguish: I had to notify the parents. My feet refused to guide me to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to my great astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed from the corner of her eye. I attributed that strangeness to the very horror she must feel, and I recalled the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible sorrows are silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself with saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive: 'After all, it is perhaps for the best; he would always have come to a bad end!' "However, the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the mother entered my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of her son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of her grief and refuse her that supreme and somber consolation. Then she begged me to show her the place where her little one had hanged himself. 'Oh no, madam' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And as my eyes turned involuntarily toward the fatal cupboard, I perceived, with disgust mingled with horror and wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the casing, with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to snatch away the last traces of the misfortune, and as I was going to hurl them out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in an irresistible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you! I beseech you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it seemed to me, so frantic that she was now overcome with tenderness toward that which had served her son as the instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as a dear and horrible relic.--And she took possession of the nail and of the twine.