A new idea, which she had not previously thought of, abruptly found an entrance into her brain, and she asked:
"Where are her clothes. They're mine. I want them. Where have they been put?"
They explained to her that they had not been found. Then she called out for them with desperate obstinacy and with repeated moans.
"They're mine—I want them. Where are they? I want them!"
The more they tried to calm her the more she sobbed, and persisted in her demands. She no longer wanted the body, she insisted on having the clothes, as much perhaps through the unconscious cupidity of a wretched being to whom a piece of silver represents a fortune, as through maternal tenderness.
And when the little body rolled up in blankets which had been brought out from Renardet's house, had disappeared in the vehicle, the old woman standing under the trees, held up by the Mayor and the Captain, exclaimed:
"I have nothing, nothing, nothing in the world, not even her little cap—her little cap."
The curé had just arrived, a young priest already growing stout. He took it on himself to carry off La Roqué, and they went away together towards the village. The mother's grief was modified under the sugary words of the clergyman, who promised her a thousand compensations. But she incessantly kept repeating:
"If I had only her little cap."
Sticking to this idea which now dominated every other.