Christiane said: "What a strange perfume he carries about him! It is rather nice. What is it?"
Gontran answered: "I don't really know; he doesn't want to tell about it. I believe it comes from Russia. 'Tis the actress, his actress, she whom I cured him of this time, that gave it to him. Yes, indeed, it has a very pleasant odor."
They saw, on their way, a group of bathers and of peasants, for it was the custom every morning before breakfast to take a turn along the road.
Christiane and Gontran joined the Marquis, Andermatt, and Paul, and soon they beheld, in the place where the knoll had stood the day before, a queer-looking human head covered with a ragged felt hat, and wearing a big white beard, looking as if it had sprung up out of the ground, the head of a decapitated man, as it were, growing there like a plant. Around it, some vinedressers were looking on, amazed, impassive, the peasantry of Auvergne not being scoffers, while three tall gentlemen, visitors at second-class hotels, were laughing and joking.
Oriol and his son stood there contemplating the vagabond, who was steeped in his hole, sitting on a stone, with the water up to his chin. He might have been taken for a desperate criminal of olden times condemned to death for some unusual kind of sorcery; and he had not let go his crutches, which were by his sides in the water.
Andermatt kept repeating enthusiastically: "Bravo! bravo! there's an example which all the people in the country suffering from rheumatic pains should imitate."
And, bending toward the old man, he shouted at him as if he were deaf: "Do you feel well?"
The other, who seemed completely stupefied by this boiling water, replied: "It seems to me that I'm melting!"
But Père Oriol exclaimed: "The hotter it is, the more good it will do you."
A voice behind the Marquis said: "What is that?"