Feeling as if he just woke from a dream, Yvon looked around and felt frozen to the marrow. The light emitted by the hearth enabled him to see distinctly among the bloody remnants near where the mastiff had been gnawing his bone, a human hand and the trunk of a human arm. Horrified as he was, Yvon approached the bleeding members.
There was no doubt. Before him lay the remains of a human body. The surprising girth that Gregory the Hollow-bellied had suddenly developed came to his mind. The mystery was explained. Nourished by human flesh, the monster had been feeding on the travelers who stopped at his place. The roast that had just been hungrily swallowed by Yvon proceeded from a recent murder. The forester's hair stood on end; he dare not look towards the table where still lay the remains of his cannibal supper. He wondered how his mouth did not reject the food. But that first and cultivated sense of horror being over, the forester could not but admit to himself that the meat he had just gulped down differed little from beef. The thought started a poignant reflection: "My son, his wife and children are at this very hour undergoing the tortures of hunger; mine has been satisfied by this food; however abominable it may be, I shall carry off the rest; the same as I was at first ignorant of what it was that I ate, my family shall not know the nature of the dish.... I shall at least have saved them for a day!" The reasoning matured into resolution.
As Yvon was about to quit the tavern with his load of human flesh, the gale that had been howling without and now found entrance through the window, violently threw open the door of a closet connecting with the room he was in. The odor of a charnel house immediately assailed the forester's nostrils. He ran to the hearth, picked up a flaming brand, and looked into the closet. Its naked walls were bespattered with blood; in a corner lay a heap of dried twigs and leaves used for kindling a fire and from beneath them protruded a foot and part of a leg. Yvon scattered the heap of kindling material with his feet ... they hid a recently mutilated corpse. The penetrating smell obviously escaped from a lower vault. Yvon noticed a trap door. Raising it, there rose so putrid an odor that he staggered back; but driven despite himself to carry his investigation to the end, he approached the flaming brand to the opening and discovered below a cavern that was almost filled with bones, heads and other human members, the bloody remnants of the travelers whom Gregory the Hollow-bellied had lived upon. In order to put an end to the horrible spectacle, Yvon hurled his flaming brand into the mortuary cellar; it was immediately extinguished; for a moment the forester remained in the dark; he then stepped back into the main room; and overcoming a fresh assault of human scruple, darted out with the remains of the roast in his bag, thinking only of his famishing family.