“The idol! What idol?” The word excited my curiosity.
“What! Did they not tell you at Perpignan, how M. de Peyrehorade had found an idol in the ground?”
“A statue in terra cotta or earthenware, do you mean?”
“No, no, in real copper, enough to make a lot of pennies with. It weighs as much as a church-bell. It was away down in the ground, at the foot of an olive-tree, that we got it.”
“Then you were present at the discovery?”
“Yes, sir. M. de Peyrehorade told us a fortnight ago, Jean Coll and me, to root up an old olive-tree that was frosted last year, for it was a very bad one, as you know. Well then, as we were busy, Jean Coll, who was going at it with all his might, gave a blow with his pick, and I hear Boom ..., as if he had struck on a bell. ‘What’s that?’ says I. We pick, and we pick, and, look! there appears a black hand, which looked like the hand of a corpse rising out of the ground. I did get a fright. I go off to the master, and I says to him, ‛Corpses, master, under the olive-tree! Must call the parson,’ ‛What corpses?’ says he to me. He comes, and has no sooner seen the hand than he cries out, ‛An antique! An antique!’ You would have thought he had found a treasure. And there he was, with the pick, with his hands, fussing away and doing as much work as the two of us, with his way of it.”
“And after all, what did you find?”
“A great black woman, more than half naked, saving your Honour’s presence, all in copper, and M. de Peyrehorade told us that it was an idol of the time of the heathens ... of the time of Charlemagne, no less!”
“I see what it is.... Just a Virgin in bronze from some convent that has been destroyed.”
“Just a Virgin! Very much so!... I’d easily have recognized it, if it had been just a Virgin. It’s an idol, I tell you; that’s well seen from her look. She fixes you with her great, white eyes.... You’d think she was staring at you. You have to cast down your eyes, you have, if you look at her.”