"Is it, then, that I must toil onwards to Châtelard?"

"Monsieur does not know? The _Hôtel Royal_ was burned to the walls six
months since."

"It follows that I must lie in the fields."

Madame hesitates, ponders, and makes up her mind.

"I keep Monsieur talking, and the night wind is sharp from the snow. It
is ill for a heated skin, and one should be indoors. I have a bedroom
that is at Monsieur's disposition, if Monsieur will condescend?"

Monsieur will condescend. Monsieur would condescend to a loft and a truss
of straw, in default of the neat little chilly chamber that is allotted
him, so sick are his very limbs with long tramping, and so uninviting
figures the further stretch in the moonlight to Châtelard, with its
burnt-out carcase of an hotel.

This is how I came to quarter myself on Madame Barbière and her idiot
son, and how I ultimately learned from the lips of the latter the strange
story of his own immediate fall from reason and the dear light of
intellect.

* * * * *

By day Camille Barbière proved to be a young man, some five and twenty
years of age, of a handsome and impressive exterior. His dark hair
lay close about his well-shaped head; his features were regular and cut
bold as an Etruscan cameo; his limbs were elastic and moulded into the