Our mother has now been dead some years; strangers occupy the house in which Ulrich Finazzer came to his dreadful death, and already the double tragedy is almost forgotten. In the sad, faded woman, prematurely grey, who lives with me, ever working silently, steadily, patiently, from morning till night at our hereditary trade, few who had known her in the freshness of her youth would now recognise my beautiful Katrine. Thus from day to day, from year to year, we journey on together, nearing the end.
Did I indeed see Ulrich Finazzer that night of his self-murder? If I did so with my bodily eyes and it was no illusion of the senses, then most surely I saw him not in life, for that dark mark which looked to me in the moonlight like a bruise was the bullet-hole in his brow.
But did I see him? It is a question I ask myself again and again, and have asked myself for years. Ah! who can answer it?
[This story, written some seventeen or eighteen years ago, was founded, to the best of my recollection, on the particulars of a French trial that I read in some old volume of _Causes Celèbres_, or _Causes Judiciaires_, the title of which I have now forgotten. I no longer remember how much of it is fact, or how much fiction; or even whether the names and dates are retained unaltered.]
It was a sultry day in the month of August, A.D. 1710. The place was wild and solitary enough--a narrow ledge of rock jutting out from a precipitous mountain-side in the department of the Haute Auvergne. The mountain was volcanic--bare and blackened towards the west; grassy to the east and south; clothed with thick chestnut-woods about the base. A sea of dusky peaks stretched all around. The deep blue sky burned overhead. All was repose; all was silence--silence in the grass, in the air, on the mountain-side.
Upon this shelf of rock lay three men, sound asleep; with their heads in the shade, their feet in the sun, and the remains of a brown loaf and a big cheese lying beside them on the grass.
The air up here was as still to-day, and as languid, as down in the green valleys below. Towards the south, a faint white mist dulled the distance; but in the direction of Clermont, on the north, every summit rose clear and keen against the sky. Most conspicuous amongst these was the long-toothed ridge of the Mont Dor; and loftiest of all, though apparently farthest, the solitary summit of the Puy de Dome. Here and there a few scattered sheep or cows might be seen as mere moving specks on some green slope of high level pasture. Now and then, the faint bleating of a stray lamb, or the bark of a herdsman's dog, or the piping of some distant shepherd boy "piping as though he should never grow old," just stirred the silence. But for these vague sounds and the low humming of insects in the grass, all was so profoundly still that it seemed as if Nature herself were holding her breath, and as if the very perfumes were asleep in the hearts of the wild flowers.