We were drinking our coffee, Lerne seated in an armchair in front of the window, holding his cup in his hand. Our talk was a broken sort of conversation, with longer and longer intervals. For want of something to talk about, the conversation languished. Gradually it ceased altogether, as a fire goes out for want of fuel. The clock struck, and one saw the woodcutters going to their work, with their axes over their shoulder. They brought before my mind a picture of ragged lictors going to carry out an execution of trees. Which amongst my old comrades would perish to-day--this beech, or that chestnut? I saw them from my window, clothed in all the yellows of autumn, from the deepest copper to the palest gold, each showing its dark touch of shade, or its reddish light amongst those various yellows. The firs were beginning to get black. Leaves were falling here and there as seemed good to themselves, for there was no breeze. With a spire like that of a cathedral, a poplar colossus with a hoary head dominated the leafage. I had always known it thus--a monumental tree--and the sight of it stirred in me the memories of my childhood. Suddenly a flight of terror-struck birds escaped from it--two rooks left it, cawing, a squirrel jumped from branch to branch, and took refuge on the neighboring walnut tree. Some unpleasant creature, climbing into the tree, had doubtless threatened their safety. I could not distinguish it, for a clump of bushes hid all the lower part of the poplar, but with a surprise that was almost pain I saw it quiver from the top to the roots, shake itself once or twice, and slowly sway its branches. One would have said that a breeze had sprung up which blew for it alone. I thought of the woodcutters, without, however, forming a very precise conception of the part they might be playing in this drama. “Can my uncle,” I said to myself, “have ordered them to execute the poplar--that venerable patriarch--that king of Fonval? That would be too much.” Then, as I was on the point of asking Lerne about the matter, I perceived that he was in one of his fainting-fits. I satisfied myself of the presence of the distinctive symptoms of his trouble, the immobility--the pallor--the fixed look--and I succeeded in determining what he was looking at with that persistent fixed stare of a somnambulist. What he was gazing at was the poplar--that _animate_ tree, whose appearance at the moment was recalling in so terrifying a way the date trees of the hothouse excited by love and battle. I remembered the note-book. Was there not some appalling analogy between the _absence_ of that man and the life of that tree?