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280 of all to peal, it seemed to say … The crickets were rasping their wing-shells ragingly. And Laurent would always see, tomorrow, afterward, fatally, the unique farm of the trip, the crushed peasant-girl, the two half-nude bronze-colored boys … For his second look had told him that the news was bad news. He would have liked to retrace his road, console the beautiful girl; he felt himself capable of watching, with them, the shade of the dead. But it was over. Far, far back already; he would never come over this road again in his life. But he had one memory the more to weigh down his heart during the suffocating heat of the dog-days. The tolling of a village bell, the rapture of the flies in the sunlight, the grinding of crickets' wings would always reproach him with the vision of folk whom he could have pitied and loved …

Thus, a quantity of scenes, to which the crowd and professional observers would have been indifferent, a face barely glimpsed, a passerby jostled, a look intercepted, a typical manner, left ineradicable impressions upon his life. He sorrowed over the loss of companions of a short journey, over meetings without a sequel; inconsolable for the bifurcation of roads which destiny imposes upon the best matched travellers.

Continual nostalgias plagued him. He was seized with a shooting desire to conjure up, at no matter what cost, these fleeting visions; he craved for these beloved apparitions, and time, far from effacing them from his memory, only improved them and gave them new strength, like noble wine.

A handsome and noble face of the people, a tall, swarthy lad with deep, inquiring eyes, leaning upon the door of a third-class railway coach, in a train