It was thus that the scene had been reported by a breathless witness-the man with a stammer whom the people of Villiers called "Loo-loo," on account of his everlasting "loo-loo-look," the introductory phrase that enabled him to embark on a conversation. This rime he was so overwhelmed that his stuttering lasted longer than usual. The men on the little terrace of the Café Royal eyed him with indulgent smiles, the younger men began to parody him. His efforts and their mockery brought tears to his eyes. The combination of this frailty and his defective speech caused him to be taken for a simpleton. He managed to overcome the strangulation of his "loo-loos" sufficiently to alert the men to the presence of the two bodies beside the river. It was his tortured expression that convinced them. They got up and followed him, as you follow the barking of a dog that despairs of conveying the urgency of its summons.

For several minutes on the bank they were blinded. Everything around them was so radiant on this fine summer's afternoon. A heat haze enveloped the willow thickets in a soft, milky light. The water with flat glittering patches rippled under the tiny promontories of plants that overhung its flow here and there. The soft and dreamy sound of it made you want to stretch out in the grass and listen distractedly to the sparse notes of the birds, to the distant crowing of the cocks that carried all the way to this spot, as if better to measure its whole summery expanse. A hundred yards away a fisherman was casting his line. Even farther away along the bank you could see the old brewery building, all garlanded in strands of hops. And more distant still, toward the horizon, the first houses of the lower town clustered together; then, climbing above them, the familiar roofs of the upper town-with the dark point of the steeple, the green mass of plane trees above the station and the place where the road turned off to Paris.