Do you know La Piroche? No. No more do I. So I shall not abuse my privilege as an author by giving you a description; especially since, between you and me be it said, they are very tiresome, those descriptions. Unless it be a question of the virgin forests of America, as in Cooper, or of Meschaccbé,[12] as in Chateaubriand, that is to say, countries that are not close at hand, and about which the imagination, to obtain a clear vision of the details, must be assisted by those poetical voyagers who have visited them, in general descriptions are not of much consequence except to be skipped by the reader. Literature has this advantage over painting, sculpture, and music; the threefold advantage of being able to paint by itself a picture in a single word, to carve a statue in one phrase, to mold a melody on one page; it must not abuse itself of that privilege, and one should leave to the special arts a little of their own prerogative. I own, then, for my part, and for lack of better advice, that when I find that I have to describe a country which every one has seen, or every one could see, if it be near, if it does not differ from our own, I prefer to leave to my reader the pleasure of recalling it if he has seen it, or of imagining it if he does not yet know it. The reader likes well enough to be left to do his share of the work he is reading. This flatters him and makes him believe that he is capable of doing the rest. Indeed, it is an excellent thing to flatter your reader. Moreover, the whole world in reality knows what the sea is like—a plain, a forest, a blue sky, an effect of sun, an effect of the moon, or an effect of storm. Of what use to dwell upon it? It would be far better to trace a landscape in one stroke of the brush like Rubens or Delacroix; this should be said without comparison and keep the whole value of your palette for the figures you wish to reanimate. When one blackens with descriptions page after page of paper, one doesn’t give the reader an impression equal to that experienced by the most artless bourgeois who walks through the Bois de Vincennes on a soft April day, or by an unlettered girl who strolls in June, on the arm of her fiancé, at eleven o’clock at night through the shady vistas of the woods of Romainville or the park of Enghien. We all have in our minds and hearts a gallery of landscapes made from memory, and which serves as background for all the stories of the world. There is but one word to use—day or night, winter or spring, calm or storm, wood or plain—to evoke at once a most finished landscape. So I have only to tell you this: that at the moment when the story I am about to tell you begins it is noon, that it is May, that the highway we are going to enter is bordered on the right with furze bushes, on the left by the sea; you know at once all that I have not told you; that is to say, that the bushes are green, that the sea is murmuring, that the sky is blue, that the sun is warm, and that there is dust on the road. I have only to add that this highway that winds along the coast of Brittany runs from La Poterie to La Piroche; that Piroche is a village about which I know nothing, but which must be more or less like all villages, that we are in the middle of the fifteenth century, in 1418, and that two men, one older than the other, one the father of the other, both peasants, are following the highway mounted on two nags trotting along comfortably enough for two nags under the weight of two peasants. “Shall we get there in time?” said the son. “Yes, it is not to take place until two o’clock,” replied the father, “and the sun marks but a quarter after noon.” “Oh, but I am curious to see that!” “I can well believe it.” “So he will be hanged in the armor that he stole?” “Yes.” “How the devil did he get the idea of stealing armor?” “It’s not the idea that is hard to get—” “It’s the armor,” interrupted the boy, who wanted his share in making a part of that joke. “And that, too, he didn’t get.” “Was it fine armor?” “Splendid, they say, all shining with gold.” “And did they catch him as he was carrying it away?” “Yes, you know as well as I do that armor like that never goes astray without raising a great outcry; it can’t escape its proper owner all by itself.” “So, then, it was of iron?” “They woke up in the château at the noise they heard.” “And did they arrest the man?” “Not at once; they began by being afraid.” “Of course, it’s always that way that people who have been robbed begin when they are in the presence of thieves; otherwise there would be no object in being a thief.” “No, nor any pleasant excitement in being robbed! But those brave folks had no idea that it was an affair of robbery.” “Of what, then?” “Of a ghost. That wretched, most vigorous fellow was carrying the armor in front of him, holding his head at the height of the loins of said armor so effectively that he acquired gigantic proportions in the corridor where he passed. Add to this a clattering noise which the rascal made behind him, and you will appreciate the fright of the valets. But, unfortunately for him, he woke up the Seigneur of La Piroche, he who has fear of neither the dead nor the living, who easily, and all by himself, arrested the thief and handed him over, bound, to his well-deserved justice.” “And his well-deserved justice?” “The condemned man is to be hanged clothed in the armor.” “Why that clause in the sentence?” “Because the Seigneur of La Piroche is not only a brave captain, but a man of common sense and of spirit, who wished to draw from this just condemnation an example for others and an advantage for himself. Why, don’t you know that whatever touches a hanged man becomes a talisman for him who possesses it? So the Seigneur of La Piroche has ordered that the thief should be hanged dressed in his armor, so as to reclaim it when the man is dead and have a talisman to wear during our next wars.” “That is very ingenious.” “I should think so.” “Let’s make haste, for I am so anxious to see the poor man hanged.” “We have plenty of time! We must not wear our beasts out. We are not going to stop at La Piroche; we will have to go on a league farther, and then return to La Poterie.” “Yes, but our beasts will rest for five or six hours, for we do not return until evening.” The father and son continued on their way, talking, and half an hour later they reached La Piroche. As the father had said, they arrived on time. Have fathers always the privilege of being right? There was an immense concourse of people on the great square in front of the château, for it was there that the scaffold had been erected, a splendid gallows, in faith, of sound oak, not very high, it is true, since it was intended for a wretched, obscure criminal, but high enough, nevertheless, for death to do its work between earth and the end of the rope which was swinging in the fresh sea breeze like an eel hanging by its tail. The condemned man was certain of having a beautiful view at the moment of death, for he was to die with his face turned toward the ocean. If this view could be any consolation to him, so much the better, but, for my part, I doubt it. And all the while the sea was blue, and from time to time between the azure of the sky and that of the sea floated a white cloud, like an angel on its way to heaven, but whose long robes still trailed upon the earth it was quitting. The two companions approached as near as possible to the scaffold, so as to miss nothing that was going on, and, like all the rest, they waited, having this advantage over the others, that they were mounted on two nags and could see better with less fatigue. They had not long to wait. At a quarter of two the gates of the château opened, and the condemned man appeared, preceded by the guards of the Seigneur of La Piroche and followed by the executioner. The thief was dressed in the stolen armor and was mounted reversed on the bare back of a jackass. He rode with vizor down and head lowered. They had tied his hands behind his back, and if they wish for our opinion in the matter we have no hesitation in saying that, judging by his position, in default of his face, which could not be seen, he ought to have been very ill at ease, and indulging at that moment in very sad reflections. They conducted him to the side of the scaffold, and a moving picture hardly pleasant for him began to silhouette itself against the blue sky. The hangman set his ladder against the scaffold, and the chaplain of the Seigneur of La Piroche, mounted on a prepared platform, delivered the sentence of justice. The condemned man did not move. One might have said that he had given the spectators the slip by dying before he was hanged. They called to him to descend from his ass and deliver himself to the hangman. He did not move. We understand his hesitation. Then the hangman took him by the elbows, lifted him off the ass, and set him upright on the ground. Fine fellow, that hangman! When we say that he set him upright, we do not lie. But we would lie in saying that he remained as they placed him. He had in two minutes jumped two-thirds of the alphabet; that is to say, in vulgar parlance, that instead of standing straight like an I, he became zigzag like a Z. During this time the chaplain finished reading the sentence. “Have you any request to make?” he asked of the culprit. “Yes,” replied the unfortunate, in a voice sad and low. “What do you ask?” “I ask for pardon.” I do not know if the word “farceur” was invented in those days, but then or never was the time to invent it and to speak it. The Seigneur of La Piroche shrugged his shoulders and ordered the executioner to do his duty. The latter made ready to mount the ladder leaning against the gibbet, which, impassive, was about to draw with extended arm the soul out of a body, and he attempted to make the condemned mount in front of him, but it was not an easy thing to do. One does not know, in general, what obstacles those condemned to death will put in the way of their dying. The hangman and the man there had the air of passing civilities one to another. It was a question of who should go first. The hangman, to make him mount on his ladder, returned to the method he employed in making him descend from his ass. He seized him around the middle of his body, balanced him on the third rung of the ladder, and began to push him up from beneath. “Bravo!” cried the crowd. He ought to have mounted well. Then the executioner adroitly slipped the running noose, which adorned the end of the rope, around the neck of the culprit, and, giving the latter a vigorous kick in the back, he flung him out into space, which strongly resembled Eternity. An immense clamor greeted this looked-for dénouement, and a shudder passed through the crowd. Whatever may be the crime he has committed, the man who dies is always at the moment greater than those who watch him die. The hanged man swung for three or four minutes at the end of his rope, as he had a right to do, danced, wriggled, then hung motionless and rigid. The Z had become an I again. They gazed a while longer on the culprit, whose gilded armor glistened in the sun, then the spectators divided themselves, little by little, into groups, and went their way home, chatting about the event. “Pooh! a horrid thing is death!” said the son of the peasant, as he continued his journey with his father. “In good faith, to hang one for not having succeeded in stealing a piece of armor, that’s expensive. What do you think?” “I wonder, I do, what they would have done to him if he had really stolen the armor?” “They would not have done anything to him, for if he had really stolen the armor he would have been able to escape from the château. Then, possibly, he would not have returned to be arrested.” “Yet he is punished more for a crime that he has not committed than he would have been if he had committed the crime!” “But he had the intention of committing it.” “And the intention was accounted as a fact—” “That is perfectly just.” “But it isn’t pretty to look at.” And since they found themselves on rising ground, the two companions turned to contemplate for the last time the silhouette of the unfortunate. Twenty minutes later they entered the little town where, save the mark! they were to receive certain moneys, and which they were to leave that evening in order to accomplish the return home that same night. On the morrow, at break of day, the guards sallied out from the château of La Piroche for the purpose of taking down the corpse of the hanging man, from which they intended to recover the armor of the Seigneur, but they discovered something which they had been far from anticipating, that is to say, the gibbet was there, as always, but the hanged man was not there. The two guards rubbed their eyes, believing themselves to be dreaming, but the thing was very real. No more hanged man, and naturally no more armor. And what was extraordinary, the rope was neither broken nor cut, but just in the condition it was before receiving the condemned. The two guards ran to announce this news to the Seigneur of La Piroche. He was not willing to believe it, and proceeded to assure himself of the truth of the facts. So puissant a seigneur was he that he was convinced the hanged man would reappear for him there; but he saw what all the rest had seen. What had become of the dead? For the condemned had certainly died the day before, before the eyes of the whole village. Had another thief profited by the night to get possession of the armor that covered the corpse? Possibly—but in taking the armor he would naturally leave the corpse, for which he had no use. Had the friends or relations of the culprit wished to give him Christian burial? Nothing impossible in that if it were not for the fact that the culprit had neither friends nor relations, and that people who had had religious sentiments like that would have taken the culprit and left the armor. That, then, was no longer to be thought of. What should one believe, then? The Seigneur of La Piroche was in despair. He was all for his armor. He made promise of a reward of ten gold écus to any one who should deliver to him the thief, dressed as he was in dying. They ransacked the houses; they found nothing. No one presented himself. They caused a sage of the town of Rennes to be sent for, and they propounded this question to him: “In what way does a dead man who has been hanged manage to free himself from the rope that holds him in the air by the neck?” The sage demanded eight days to ponder over the question, at the termination of which he replied: “He can not do it.” Then they propounded this second question: “A thief, unsuccessful in stealing while alive, and having been condemned to death for stealing, can he steal after his death?” The sage replied: “Yes.” He was asked how it could be done. He replied that he knew nothing about it. He was the greatest sage of his time. They sent him home and contented themselves with believing, for those were the days of witchcraft, that the thief was a wizard. Then they said masses to exorcise that evil spirit, which was without doubt taking his revenge upon the Seigneur who had ordered his death and upon those who had come to see him die. A month passed in fruitless search. The gibbet still stood there as always, humiliated, gloomy, and discredited. Never had a gibbet committed such a breach of confidence. The Seigneur of La Piroche continued to clamor for his armor from man, God, and the devil. Nothing. At last he was beginning, without a doubt, to make the best of this strange event, and of the loss which had been the result, when one morning, as he was waking, he heard a great commotion on the square where the execution had taken place. He was making ready to inform himself of what was passing when his chaplain entered the room. “Monseigneur,” said he, “do you know what has happened?” “No, but I am going to ask.” “I can tell you, I can.” “What is it, then?” “A miracle from heaven!” “Really!” “The hanged man—” “Well?” “He is there!” “Where?” “On the scaffold.” “Hanging?” “Yes, Monseigneur.” “In his armor?” “In your armor.” “True, for it is mine. And is he dead?” “Absolutely dead—only—” “Only what?” “Did he have spurs on when they hanged him?” “No.” “Well, Monseigneur, he has them, and in place of having the casque on his head, he has placed it with great care at the foot of the gibbet, and left his head hanging uncovered.” “Let us see, Mr. Chaplain, let us see, straight off!” The Seigneur of La Piroche ran to the square crowded with the curious. The neck of the hanged man had passed again into the running noose, the corpse was there at the end of the rope, and the armor was there on the corpse. It was astounding. So they proclaimed it a miracle. “He has repented,” said one, “and has come to hang himself over again.” “He has been there all the time,” said another; “only we did not see him.” “But why has he got spurs?” asked a third. “No doubt, because he has come from afar and wished to return in a hurry.” “I know well, for my part, that far or near, I would not have needed to put on spurs, for I would not have come back.” And they laughed, and they stared at the ugly face the dead man made. As for the Seigneur of La Piroche, he thought of nothing but of making sure that the thief was quite dead, and of securing his armor. They cut down the corpse and stripped it; then, once despoiled, they hung it up again, and the ravens investigated so thoroughly that at the end of two days it was all jagged, at the end of eight days it had only the appearance of a rag, and at the end of fifteen days it had no longer the appearance of anything at all; or, if it did resemble anything, it was only those impossible hanged men we used to make pictures of on the first page of our text-book, and below which we wrote the amphibious quatrain, half Latin, half French: Aspice Pierrot pendu, Qui nunc librum n’a pas rendu, Si hunc librum reddidisset: Pierrot pendu non-faisset.[13] But what had the hanged man been doing during his month of absence? How did it happen that he escaped, and, having escaped, that he hanged himself again? We will give below the three versions which have been presented to us. A magician, a pupil of Merlin, declared that if at the moment of dying the culprit has had the will to disappear and the ability to absorb his body into his will, the will being an immaterial thing, invisible, and impalpable, the body, which finds itself absorbed by it, and consequently hidden in it, becomes by that means also impalpable, immaterial, and invisible, and that if the body of a thief has reappeared at the end of a month, and at the end of a rope, it is because at that supreme moment his will, troubled by his conscience, has not had sufficient force for eternal absorption. This may not be a good version, but it is one. The theologians affirm that the culprit did succeed in vanishing, but that, pursued by remorse and being in haste to reconcile himself with God, he could not endure the life longer than one month, and, full of repentance, came to execute upon himself that justice which he had escaped the first time. That, perhaps, is not the true version, but it is always Christian logic, and as a Christian we will not dismiss it altogether. Finally, they declared that our two peasants in returning home that evening, and passing close to the gibbet, heard lamentations, a rattling, and something like a prayer; that they piously crossed themselves and demanded what was the matter; that they received no reply, but the lamentations continued, and it seemed to them that they came from the corpse that was above their heads. Then they took the ladder that the hangman had left at the foot of the scaffold, rested it against the arm of the gibbet, and the son, having mounted to the level of the condemned, said to him: “Is it you who are making these complaints, poor man?” The condemned gathered all his strength together and said: “Yes.” “Then you are still alive?” “Yes.” “You repent of your crime?” “Yes.” “Then I will loosen you, and since the Evangelist commands us to give succor to those who suffer, and that you suffer, I am going to succor you and bring you to life in order to bring you to good. God prefers a soul that repents to a corpse that expiates.” Then the father and the son cut down the dying man, and saw how it was that he still lived. The rope, instead of tightening about the neck of the thief, had tightened at the base of the casque so effectually that the culprit was suspended but not strangled, and, occupying with his head a kind of vantage-point in the interior of the casque, he was able to breathe and to keep alive up to the time our two companions passed by. The latter took him down and carried him home with them, where they gave him into the care of the mother and the young daughter. But he who has stolen will steal. There were but two things to steal at the peasant’s, for the money he had brought back with him was not in his house. These two things were his horse and his daughter, a fair-haired girl of sixteen. The ex-hanged decided to steal both the one and the other, for he was covetous of the horse and had fallen in love with the daughter. So one night he saddled the horse, buckled on the spurs to make him ride faster, and went to take the young girl while she was asleep, and lift her up on to the crupper. But the girl awoke and cried out. The father and the son came running up. The thief tried to escape, but he was too late. The young girl told about the attempt of the hanged man; and the father and the son, seeing well that no repentance was to be expected from such a man, resolved to execute justice upon him, but more effectually than the Seigneur of La Piroche had allowed himself to do it. They bound the thief to the horse which he had saddled himself, led him to the square of La Piroche, and strung him up there where he had been hanged, but placed his casque on the ground to make sure that he should not vanish again; then they returned home quietly. There is the third version. I do not know why I believe it to be the most probable, and that you would do well, like me, to give it preference over the other two. As for the Seigneur of La Piroche, as soon as he had secured a real talisman, he went happily off to the wars, where he was the first to be killed.