Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the
waiters in the café, the grocer's assistants, the girls at the laundry,
the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a
neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her
face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the
corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself
at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the
particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God,
what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a
social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and
respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she
learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not
conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him
to unpleasantness.

"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed
himself, you must never touch him before the police come."

Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement
having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because
events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they
take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They
unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a
succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the
everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent
death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of
that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the
occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary's
he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on
his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.