The soil was covered with fragments which other men cut in their turn, bound in bundles, and piled in heaps, while the trees which were still left standing seemed like enormous posts, gigantic forms amputated and shorn by the keen steel of the cutting instruments. And when the lopper had finished his task, he left at the top of the straight slender shaft of the tree the rope collar which he had brought up with him, and afterwards descends again with spurlike prods along the discrowned trunk, which the woodcutters thereupon attacked at the base, striking it with great blows which resounded through all the rest of the wood. When the foot seemed pierced deeply enough, some men commenced dragging to the accompaniment of a cry in which they joined harmoniously, at the rope attached to the top; and, all of a sudden, the immense mast cracked and tumbled to the earth with the dull sound and shock of a distant cannon-shot. And each day the wood grew thinner, losing its trees which fell down one by one, as an army loses its soldiers. Renardet no longer walked up and down. He remained from morning till night, contemplating, motionless, and with his hands behind his back the slow death of his wood. When a tree fell, he placed his foot on it as if it were a corpse. Then he raised his eyes to the next with a kind of secret, calm impatience, as if he had expected, hoped for, something at the end of this massacre. Meanwhile, they were approaching the place where little Louise Roque had been found. At length, they came to it one evening, at the hour of twilight. As it was dark, the sky being overcast, the woodcutters wanted to stop their work, putting off till next day the fall of an enormous beech-tree, but the master objected to this, and insisted that even at this hour they should lop and cut down this giant, which had overshadowed the crime. When the lopper had laid it bare, had finished its toilets for the guillotine, when the woodcutters were about to sap its base, five men commenced hauling at the rope attached to the top. The tree resisted; its powerful trunk, although notched up to the middle was as rigid as iron. The workmen, altogether, with a sort of regular jump, strained at the rope, stooping down to the ground, and they gave vent to a cry with throats out of breath, so as to indicate and direct their efforts. Two woodcutters standing close to the giant, remained with axes in their grip, like two executioners ready to strike once more, and Renardet, motionless, with his hand on the bark, awaited the fall with an uneasy, nervous feeling. One of the men said to him: "You're too near, Monsieur le Maire. When it falls, it may hurt you." He did not reply and did not recoil. He seemed ready himself to catch the beech-tree in his open arms in order to cast it on the ground like a wrestler.