A first passer-by made a sound of wooden sabots on the hard pavé, as of someone staggering. Then another, then many. They followed all the same direction in a lower street which led to the gate of the naval dockyard.
Soon this tapping of sabots became a thing extraordinary; a fatiguing, continuous noise, hammering the silence like a nightmare music.
Hundreds and hundreds of sabots, tramping before daylight, coming from everywhere, and passing along the street below; a kind of early morning procession of evil import: it was the workers returning to the dockyard, still staggering from having drank so much the night before, the gait unsteady, the eyes lustreless.
And there were women also, ugly, pale, and wet, who went to right and left as if seeking someone: in the half light they peered into the faces of the men—waiting and watching there, to see if the husband, or the son, had at last come out of the taverns, if he was going to do his day's work.
The man lying in the gutter was also examined by them; two or three bent over him so that they might better distinguish his face. They saw features youthful but weatherbeaten, and set now in a corpse-like fixity, the lips contracted, the teeth clenched. No, they did not know him. And in any case he was not a workman, this man; he wore the large blue collar of a sailor.
One of them, nevertheless, who had a son a sailor, tried, out of kindness of heart, to drag him from the water. He was too heavy.
"What a big corpse!" she said as she let his arms drop.
This body on which had fallen all the rain of the night was Yves.
A little later, when it was full daylight, his comrades, who were passing, recognized him and carried him away.
They laid him, all soaked with the water of the gutter, at the bottom of the cutter, itself wet from the spray of the sea, and quickly they put off with canvas spread.