I had scarcely left her when a terrible flutter of wings warned me that something was happening. I hastened back. The irreproachable wife was dead, killed by the lovers, whom two days had sufficed to unite in indissoluble bonds of infamy. The unlucky creature lay with her skull broken open by their beaks, and the murderers sated their ferocity upon the dead body, which I had difficulty in wresting from them.
There are no courts of law in the animal world, wherefore Providence had no option but to crown the triumph of crime with happy peace. This it did with its customary generosity. The two villains live happy in their love. They have had, and will yet have, many children.
Here is the history of a man without a history. As far back as I can remember, I can see in the great court of honour of the Manor, devoted to plebeian uses since the Revolution, Six Cents, the sawyer, silently occupied with making boards out of the trunks of poplars, elms, and oaks, which at the end of my last vacation I had left green and living, filled with the song of birds, and whose corpses I found on my return tragically piled up for the posthumous torture by which man pursues his work of death-dealing civilization.
Jacques Barbot, commonly called Six Cents, was in those days the representative of industry in the rural world; he typified man in the first stage above the purely agricultural labourer of olden times. To prepare the raw material for the next man to use was his social function. He had certainly never given thought to this, any more than to the cruel fate which makes of man the first victim of his inventions, pregnant though they be of future benefit. For how many centuries the grinding of wheat chained the slave to the millstone, until the day dawned when the beast of burden, the wind, water and steam, came to take his place. Even to-day, how much serf's labour still awaits the ingenuity of future liberators!
It is certain that Six Cents, although he expressed his views to nobody, for discretion of thought was chief among his characteristics, did not feel himself a slave, in his quiet patience under the common subjugation of labour. As it happened, the machine which set him free promptly dealt him his death blow.