She looks at him and stops, framed by the hawthorn. Her strangely slight and pale face is apprehensive, the lids tremble on her magnificent eyes. She is bareheaded, and in the hollowed neck of her linen corsage there is the dawning of her flesh. So near, she is truly enticing in the sunshine, this woman crowned with gold, and one's glance is impelled and astonished by the moon-like purity of her skin. Her eyes sparkle; her teeth, too, glisten white in the living wound of her half-open mouth, red as her heart. "Tell me--I am going to tell you," pants Lamuse. "I like you so much--" He outstretches his arm towards the motionless, beloved wayfarer. She starts, and replies to him, "Leave me alone--you disgust me!" The man's hand is thrown over one of her little ones. She tries to draw it back, and shakes it to free herself. Her intensely fair hair falls loose, flaming. He draws her to him. His head bends towards her, and his lips are ready. His desire--the wish of all his strength and all his life--is to caress her. He would die that he might touch her with his lips. But she struggles, and utters a choking cry. She is trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured with abhorrence. I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention is not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished. "Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie. "No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered. "Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and he does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging, gazing at the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick, torn from his dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire. I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining strength could subdue. The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a barrel, has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He disappears round the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow as a Camembert, his scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and so emaciated himself that one could fancy his feet were fastened to his trunk by strings through his flopping trousers. And among the idle poilus of the guard-room at the end of the place, under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on the subject of this wandering buffoon. "He has a dirty neb," says Bigornot; "and I'll tell you what I think--they've no business to let civvies mess about at the front with their pretty ringlets, and especially individuals that you don't know where they come from." "You're quite crushing, you portable louse," replies Cornet.