The same month . . .
To-day I made a long expedition to Champrosay. Reassured by the stillness around me, I harnessed Colaquet in good time, and we started. Failing the sight of a human face, I longed to gaze on roads and houses.
I left Champrosay sad at heart. The desolation of those abandoned houses had struck and chilled me like the cold damp falling from the walls of a cellar. Instead of going straight hack to the Hermitage, I went a long way round by the woods. I felt a craving for air and Nature.
Unluckily all this side of the forest bears an aspect of wildness and neglect, which is not very inspiriting. Old and now unused quarries have left there piles of rocks, and a scattering of pebbles, which make the soil both dry and barren. Not a single blade of grass is to be seen on the paths. Wild stocks, brambles, and ivy alone spring up from out of these large gaping holes, clinging by all their roots to the uneven edges of the stones, and through the bare and interwoven branches, the quarries appear still deeper. For a short time we had been winding our way among the rocks. Suddenly Colaquet stopped short, and his ears began to tremble with fear. What is the matter with him? I lean forward and look . . . It is the body of a Prussian soldier that has been pitched down head-foremost into the quarry. I must confess it gave me a shudder. Had it been on the highway or in the plain, this corpse would not have horrified me so much. Where there are so many soldiers and so many guns, the probability of death seems ever present; but here in this hollow, in this out-of-the-way part of the wood, it bore an appearance of murder and mystery . . . Looking more attentively, I thought I recognised my robber of the other day, he who was singing so lustily about the month of May. Has he been killed by a peasant? But where could the peasant have come from? There is nobody left at Champrosay, Minville, or the Meillottes. More probably it is the result of some drunken quarrel between comrades, like the one I saw from the windows of the Hermitage . . .
I went home very quickly; and all through the evening I was haunted by the idea that my only guest, my only companion in the whole of the dreary forest, was that dead body stretched out on the red sand of the quarries . . .
