There are men's boots. What are men's boots doing here, sticking up straight out of the ruins of altars?
They are the boots of the dead men. Those things among the stones are dead men. You go to see what the boots are doing here, and you find that the blue-and-red heaps are dead men.
How they sink into the earth! They are trying to get back into the earth, whence they came. They came from it and are trying to get back, as fast as they can, into it.
This was once a church. And once upon a time, ages and ages ago, or only some days and days ago, Monsieur le Curé stood against the pillar and began to scold.
The women used to stand and gossip in the market-place; the children used to romp in the cobbled street; the men used to go fishing.
The graveyard about this heap of stones, that once was a church, is a strange place, full of trampled straw, and of long heaps of red and blue, that end in boots. The walls of the graveyard are everywhere pierced with holes, that often those long heaps lie under. Monsieur le Curé does not know why the straw is there.
And so Monsieur le Curé has become a little mad.
In one of those days, it seems, he came across Madelon sitting against a wall, quite dead. It was in the rue du Château. Much of the wall was fallen down, but just where Madelon sat the bit of it standing was radiant with roses. Madelon sat on the grass against the wall, her legs stuck straight out, her hands on the grass, her head hanging forward, tangled hair over her staring eyes, and her mouth wide open.
The curé says he does not know what it was that happened to Madelon.
By the fire, in a bright room, Monsieur le Curé talked to me of the church that Sunday morning, and made me see it; and made me see, as if I stood there that other day with him, the broken things, and black, twisted things, and the things that the earth was taking back. He talked quietly, even of Madelon, and said he was so glad that, that last time, God had not let him scold.