"I have found nothing, M'sieu le Maire, nothing at all anywhere."
The doctor, scared, replied in a thick voice, drowned in tears:
"What is that you could not find?"
"The little girl's clothes."
"Well—well—look again, and find them—or you'll have to answer to me."
The man, knowing that the Mayor would not brook opposition, set forth again with hesitating steps, casting on the corpse indirect and timid glances.
Distant voices arose under the trees, a confused sound, the noise of an approaching crowd; for Mederic had, in the course of his rounds carried the news from door to door. The people of the neighborhood, stupefied at first, had gone chatting from their own firesides into the street, from one threshold to another. Then they gathered together. They talked over, discussed, and commented on the event for some minutes, and they had now come to see it for themselves.
They arrived in groups a little faltering and uneasy through fear of the first impression of such a scene on their minds. When they saw the body they stopped, not daring to advance, and speaking low. They grew bold, went on a few steps, stopped again, advanced once more, and soon they formed around the dead girl, her mother, the doctor, and Renardet, a thick circle, agitated and noisy, which crushed forward under the sudden pushes of the last comers. And now they touched the corpse. Some of them even bent down to feel it with their fingers. The doctor kept them back. But the mayor, waking abruptly out of his torpor, broke into a rage, and, seizing Dr. Labarbe's stick, flung himself on his townspeople, stammering:
"Clear out—clear out—you pack of brutes—clear out!"
And in a second, the crowd of sightseers had fallen back two hundred meters.