"The stiffs are old ones, but the rats
talk to 'em. You see some rats laid out--poisoned, p'raps--near
every body or under it. Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us
his." He lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two
dead rats.
"I should like to find Farfadet again," says Volpatte. "I told him
to wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me. Poor
lad, let's hope he waited!"
So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange
curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to
another, and at each step he looks on the ground. Suddenly he utters
a cry of distress. With his hand he beckons us as he kneels to a
dead man.
Bertrand!
Acute emotion grips us. He has been killed; he, too, like the rest,
he who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence. By
virtue of always doing his duty. he has at last got killed. He has
at last found death where indeed it was.
We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each
other.
The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his
remains present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed
a grotesque look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so
tranquil. With his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache
trailing in his mouth, and his face swollen--he is laughing. One eye
is widely open, the other shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms
are outstretched in the form of a cross: the hands open, the fingers
separated.
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