“But why has he got spurs?” asked a third. “No doubt, because he has come from afar and wished to return in a hurry.” “I know well, for my part, that far or near, I would not have needed to put on spurs, for I would not have come back.” And they laughed, and they stared at the ugly face the dead man made. As for the Seigneur of La Piroche, he thought of nothing but of making sure that the thief was quite dead, and of securing his armor. They cut down the corpse and stripped it; then, once despoiled, they hung it up again, and the ravens investigated so thoroughly that at the end of two days it was all jagged, at the end of eight days it had only the appearance of a rag, and at the end of fifteen days it had no longer the appearance of anything at all; or, if it did resemble anything, it was only those impossible hanged men we used to make pictures of on the first page of our text-book, and below which we wrote the amphibious quatrain, half Latin, half French: _Aspice_ Pierrot pendu, _Qui nunc librum_ n’a pas rendu, _Si hunc librum reddidisset:_ Pierrot pendu _non-faisset_.[13] But what had the hanged man been doing during his month of absence? How did it happen that he escaped, and, having escaped, that he hanged himself again? We will give below the three versions which have been presented to us. A magician, a pupil of Merlin, declared that if at the moment of dying the culprit has had the will to disappear and the ability to absorb his body into his will, the will being an immaterial thing, invisible, and impalpable, the body, which finds itself absorbed by it, and consequently hidden in it, becomes by that means also impalpable, immaterial, and invisible, and that if the body of a thief has reappeared at the end of a month, and at the end of a rope, it is because at that supreme moment his will, troubled by his conscience, has not had sufficient force for eternal absorption. This may not be a good version, but it is one. The theologians affirm that the culprit did succeed in vanishing, but that, pursued by remorse and being in haste to reconcile himself with God, he could not endure the life longer than one month, and, full of repentance, came to execute upon himself that justice which he had escaped the first time. That, perhaps, is not the true version, but it is always Christian logic, and as a Christian we will not dismiss it altogether. Finally, they declared that our two peasants in returning home that evening, and passing close to the gibbet, heard lamentations, a rattling, and something like a prayer; that they piously crossed themselves and demanded what was the matter; that they received no reply, but the lamentations continued, and it seemed to them that they came from the corpse that was above their heads. Then they took the ladder that the hangman had left at the foot of the scaffold, rested it against the arm of the gibbet, and the son, having mounted to the level of the condemned, said to him: