Paoli Palabretti had a long fit of coughing and then said: "He escaped to the mountain. It was my brother who killed him the following year. You know, my brother, Philippi Palabretti, the bandit." Jeanne shuddered. "Your brother a bandit?" With a gleam of pride in his eye, the calm Corsican replied: "Yes, madame. He was celebrated, that one. He laid low six gendarmes. He died at the same time as Nicolas Morali, when they were trapped in the Niolo, after six days of fighting, and were about to die of hunger. "The country is worth it," he added with a resigned air in the same tone in which he said: "It is the air of the Val, which is cool." Then they went home to dinner, and the little Corsican woman behaved as if she had known them for twenty years. But Jeanne was worried. When Julien again held her in his arms, would she experience the same strange and intense sensation that she had felt on the moss beside the spring? And when they were alone together that evening she trembled lest she should still be insensible to his kisses. But she was reassured, and this was her first night of love. The next day, as they were about to set out, she decided that she would not leave this humble cottage, where it seemed as though a fresh happiness had begun for her. She called her host's little wife into her room and, while making clear that she did not mean it as a present, she insisted, even with some annoyance, on sending her from Paris, as soon as she arrived, a remembrance, a remembrance to which she attached an almost superstitious significance. The little Corsican refused for some time, not wishing to accept it. But at last she consented, saying: "Well, then, send me a little pistol, a very small one." Jeanne opened her eyes in astonishment. The other added in her ear, as one confides a sweet and intimate secret: "It is to kill my brother-in-law." And smiling, she hastily unwound the bandages around the helpless arm, and showing her firm, white skin with the scratch of a stiletto across it, now almost healed, she said: "If I had not been almost as strong as he is, he would have killed me. My husband is not jealous, he knows me; and, besides, he is ill, you know, and that quiets your blood. And, besides, madame, I am an honest woman; but my brother-in-law believes all that he hears. He is jealous for my husband and he will surely try it again. Then I shall have my little pistol; I shall be easy, and sure of my revenge." Jeanne promised to send the weapon, kissed her new friend tenderly and they set out on their journey. The rest of the trip was nothing but a dream, a continual series of embraces, an intoxication of caresses. She saw nothing, neither the landscape, nor the people, nor the places where they stopped. She saw nothing but Julien.