At another time, the careful horseman, who loved his beasts, would very quickly have noticed that his horse's wind was broken, when he felt his sides rise and fall with that short, hard, jerky breath; but Renaud was conscious of nothing. There was nothing in his head but a burning void. He did not even long for shade or rest. He was suffering from the utter dejection that follows terrible crises, from the great sorrow caused by death, from hopeless despair. Overwhelmed as he was by his selfish weariness, if he had been capable of recognizing any sentiment in his mind, he would have found there a vague, cowardly feeling of annoyance at having to enter a sick-chamber, at having to witness the spectacle of Livette's suffering. He would have liked--but he had not the strength to do it--to dismount from his horse, to lie down in the fresh air, under a tamarisk, and sleep there a long, long time; to forget himself, to cease to see or speak or hear or listen or exist!--He was like one walking in his sleep. Suddenly Blanchet stopped, and began to tremble in every limb, and, before his rider had come to his senses, his four legs, planted stiffly like stakes, seemed to be broken by a single blow, and he fell in a heap. Renaud awoke, standing on his feet beside his fallen horse. Blanchet was dying. It was soon over. The honest creature opened, to an unnatural width, his great glazed eyes, green as the stagnant water in the swamps, and filled with that wondering expression which the infinite mystery of living or of having lived imparts to the gaze of little children, animals, and dying men; he straightened out his four legs, trembling like the reeds in the marshes. A shiver ran over his whole body, riddled with the stings of a myriad of gnats and great flies, some of which flew up into the air and settled down again in the corners of the dim, wide-open eyes. Then the poor creature became motionless, with an indefinable something that was alarming and terrible in his immobility, something that put joy to flight, that seemed to imply finality. It was death. Blanchet had ended his humble Camarguese life in the open desert, in the bright sunlight. Livette's horse was dead in the service of Renaud's passion for Zinzara! The faithful beast did not know what had happened; he did not know the reason of the forced journeys, the multiplied wounds inflicted by Renaud's spurs, by the stings of the gadflies, and by Zinzara's pin, buried in his flesh; he had submitted, without a murmur, to the destiny that bade him suffer at the hands of those who might have made life pleasanter for him, and, as he lay dead, his eyes still expressed his endless amazement at his failure to understand what was expected of him.