One day they found, on the shore of the Vaccarès, Rampal's bleeding body, pierced by horns in two places. Bernard alone saw his duel with Renaud one evening, when the sky was red with the afterglow. They fought hand to hand, in the midst of the drove, and Renaud, lifting his enemy from the ground in his arms, laid him face upward, dead, on the horns of a heifer that came rushing at them and, with one motion of her bulky head, tossed a corpse into the air. Rampal died without a cry. He lay three days where he fell. The black bulls, that mourn nine days when one of their kind falls dead in the pasture, bellowed for three days around Rampal's body, at a respectful distance. Bernard alone saw the duel and said nothing; but the people of the desert knew; they guessed the truth. Since that, Renaud has become like a phantom himself. In all weathers, summer or winter, rain or shine, he can be seen here and there, in the Camargue desert, sitting erect and melancholy on his horse, spear in hand. He regrets Livette. He loves Zinzara. He weeps only for himself, the wretched creature! He has lost the paradise of affection he had dreamed of, and the appetizing hell of savage love he had tasted. He has nothing. It seems to him that Livette's death, for which he blames himself, has left him free to abandon himself to his passion for the other; but the other is absent--and, though absent, she tortures him as relentlessly as on the day when, clinging to his horse's mane, she defied him with insulting words, and aroused his passions, while he dared not shake her off, trample upon her, or seize her. The memory of her is upon him like the gadfly that persists in following back the bloody track of its sting. Vainly does he shake himself; he cannot rid himself of it. Renaud loves Zinzara; he longs for her without hope, and, ruled by that single desire, he feels no other, so that the unexpended power of his youth accumulates within him and drives him mad. The friends' houses, the fêtes he used formerly to visit, have no further interest for him, because the only being he seeks cannot be found. The desert, once peopled with hopes in his eyes, has become an empty void. The roads that traverse it no longer lead anywhere. He surprises himself sometimes, at night, bellowing with the bulls, against the wind that annoys them, toward the distant horizon. He is like one possessed. A devil dwells within him. When he is weary of wandering about and of being in the saddle, and chooses to lie down and sleep for a day, he repairs to the cabin of his love, in the _gargate_, and there, full sure of being undisturbed, raves like a wild beast, in his frenzy at being alone. In the morning, he emerges from his retreat, more depressed, more miserable, more haunted with visions than ever.