CHAPTER III
THE PROCESSION
I cannot describe my agony during the morning of the following day. I
remember it as a hideous dream in which my impressions were so ghastly
and so confused that I could not formulate them. The persistent yearning
for a sudden awakening increased my torture, and as the hour for the
funeral drew nearer my anguish became more poignant still.
It was only at daybreak that I had recovered a fuller consciousness of
what was going on around me. The creaking of hinges startled me out of
my stupor. Mme Gabin had just opened the window. It must have been
about seven o'clock, for I heard the cries of hawkers in the street, the
shrill voice of a girl offering groundsel and the hoarse voice of a
man shouting "Carrots!" The clamorous awakening of Paris pacified me at
first. I could not believe that I should be laid under the sod in the
midst of so much life; and, besides, a sudden thought helped to calm me.
It had just occurred to me that I had witnessed a case similar to my own
when I was employed at the hospital of Guerande. A man had been sleeping
twenty-eight hours, the doctors hesitating in presence of his apparent
lifelessness, when suddenly he had sat up in bed and was almost at once
able to rise.
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