CHAPTER XI.
Whilst Hullin, at the Head of the mountaineers, was taking his measures for the defence of his country, the fool Yégof—that being deprived of the blessing of self-consciousness, that unhappy creature with his tin crown, that sad spectacle of humanity shorn of its noblest, greatest, most vital attribute, intelligence—the fool Yégof, his breast exposed to the cutting wind, his feet bare, insensible to cold, like the reptile in his icy prison, was wandering from mountain to mountain, in the midst of the snows of winter.
Whence comes it that the madman is able to resist the sharpest severity of the atmosphere, while an intelligent being would succumb to it? Does it arise from a more powerful concentration of life, a more rapid circulation of the blood, a state of perpetual fever? Or is it the effect of the over-excitement of the senses, or any other unknown cause?
Science says nothing. She admits only material causes, powerless to give an account of such phenomena.
So Yégof went on at random, and night came. The cold was redoubled, the fox gnashed his teeth in the pursuit of an invisible prey; the famished buzzard fell back with empty claws among the bushes, uttering a cry of distress. He, with his raven on his shoulder, gesticulating, jabbering, as if in a dream, kept marching, marching on, from Holderloch to Sonneberg, from Sonneberg to Blutfeld.
Now, on this particular night, the old shepherd, Robin, of the farm of Bois-de-Chêne, was destined to be the witness of a most strange and fearful sight.
Some days before, having been overtaken by the first fall of snow at the bottom of the gorge of the Blutfeld, he had left his cart there to conduct his flock back to the farm; but having discovered that he had forgotten his sheepskin, and left it in a shed there, he had on this day, when his work was done, set out about four o'clock in the afternoon to go and fetch it.