"She must have been bathing, no doubt. They ought to be at the water's edge." The Mayor thereupon gave directions: "Do you, Princepe" (this was his secretary), "go and look for those clothes for me along the river. Do you, Maxime" (this was the steward), "hurry on towards Roug-le-Tors, and bring on here to me the examining magistrate with the gendarmes. They must be here within an hour. You understand." The two men quickly departed, and Renardet said to the doctor: "What miscreant has been able to do such a deed in this part of the country." The doctor murmured: "Who knows? Everyone is capable of that? Everyone in particular and nobody in general. No matter, it must be some prowler, some workman out of employment. As we live under a Republic, we must expect to meet only this kind of person along the roads." Both of them were Bonapartists. The Mayor went on: "Yes, it can only be a stranger, a passer-by, a vagabond without heart or home." The doctor added with the shadow of a smile on his face: "And without a wife. Having neither a good supper nor a good bed, he procured the rest for himself. You can't tell how many men there may be in the world capable of a crime at a given moment. Did you know that this little girl had disappeared?" And with the end of his stick he touched one after the other the stiffened fingers of the corpse, resting on them as on the keys of a piano. "Yes, the mother came last night to look for me about nine o'clock, the child not having come home from supper up to seven. We went to try and find her along the roads up to midnight, but we did not think of the wood. However, we needed daylight to carry out a search with a practical result." "Will you have a cigar?" said the doctor. "Thanks, I don't care to smoke. It gives me a turn to look at this." They both remained standing in front of this corpse of a young girl, so pale, on the dark moss. A big fly with a blue belly that was walking along one of the thighs, stopped at the bloodstains, went on again, always rising higher, ran along the side with his lively, jerky movements, climbed up one of the breasts, then came back again to explore the other, looking out for something to drink on this dead girl. The two men kept watching this wandering black speck. The doctor said: "How pretty it is, a fly on the skin! The ladies of the last century had good reason to paste them on their faces. Why has this fashion gone out?" The Mayor seemed not to hear, plunged as he was in deep thought. But, all of a sudden, he turned round, for he was surprised by a shrill noise. A woman in a cap and a blue apron rushed up under the trees. It was the mother, La Roque. As soon as she saw Renardet she began to shriek: