The doctors of Arles tried everything. Nothing was of any avail. "I want no more of their medicine," she said one day to Renaud. "They might do very well for swamp fever, but there is something else the matter with me. It was my heart that you drowned. I never could believe you again; it is much better that I should die." She had explained nothing to her father or grandmother. "They would have turned you out of the house," she said, "and I wanted to see you to the end." Her journey to the Icard farm, her nocturnal flight, her accident, all were attributed to an attack of fever, which was supposed to have been responsible for her actions, whereas, on the contrary, her illness was the result of them all. Renaud, by a desperate effort, mastered his passion at last. Was it forever? He chose to think so, because it was necessary that it should be so, in order to keep her alive. He tried not to think of the other. He tried to repent. Every moment he tore from his mind by an exertion of his will--as he would tear up grass with his hand--some one of his memories. He told amusing stories, pretending to laugh loudest at them. His heart was filled with a great pity for Livette, but, for all that, you would not have had to lift a very large stone to find there, in a spot that he knew well, the sleeping viper. "I shall die, I shall die!"--Livette often said, "but I want to see the fête of Saintes-Maries once more. I want to live till then. You must carry me there and lay me on the relics; that is where I want to die. And at my burial, I want the drovers, your comrades, to follow on horseback--promise me this--with their spears reversed, like the soldiers I saw at Avignon one day, marching to the cemetery, holding their guns that way." With a sort of gaiety, she often recurred to the subject of her burial, and embellished it with other details, saying, with the air of a playful child: "There must be lilies, as there are in the procession at Saintes-Maries when they go to bless the sea; I want lots of lilies! Lilies are so pretty and white! they are so proud on their stalks, and they smell so sweet!" Meanwhile, the season was hastening away; the months came and went, like the same months in years past for centuries. Summer set the sky and land and sea ablaze, drawing the last drop of moisture from the swamps, sowing the venomous seeds of miasma in the heavy air that people breathed. The crops ripened; then came the harvest. It was autumn. The redbreast sang in the park of the Château d'Avignon. The nights grew long once more. The leaves fell. The sad days of the year began. The buttercups had disappeared. The Vaccarès, which had been dry all summer, no longer exposed to the sun its lovely mouse-gray bed; it was once more a sea. The light golden tint of the September sky was long since hidden from sight behind the rising mists.