Those who prepare the dead came. They stood on the threshold peeping and queerly looking in at the door.
A gray mist filled the place like a cloud, through which things were visible. The rooms were damp as an old vault, and full of a death-like smell; the walls were covered with green mould; the woodwork was rotten. The candles had guttered and dripped and gone out; the floor was bespattered with tallow. All around the rooms were coffers of linen and lace, “coffres très beaux, coffres mignons, de dressouer compagnons; coffres de boys qui point n’empire; madres et jaunes comme cire.” All the coffers were open, and everything that was in them was tossed wildly about the floor; not one piece of the lovely old stuffs, as yellow as wax, but was blackened by showers of soot and trampled under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the print of whose hoofs was everywhere.
And Madame Margot?
Heh! God had designed her for tragedy; but here was comedy. Margot lay stretched out on the floor, as black as ebony; dead, among the ashes and soot, charred like a fallen star.
The coroner found that the woman had died of the visitation of God; but Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has God feet like a goat?”
The bishop refused to have masses said for the repose of her pitiful soul; and they would not allow her to be buried in St. Sebastian’s graveyard. The potter’s field was the place for her; her color was too peculiar.
Too black to be buried among the white, too white to lie down with the black, she was buried, in secret, in her own garden, under the magnolia-trees.
And that was the end of Madame Margot.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.