No doubt a few persons followed the bier, some of the inhabitants
of the lodginghouse, perhaps--Simoneau and others, for instance--for
faint whisperings reached my ear. Then I heard a psalm chanted and some
Latin words mumbled by a priest, and afterward I suddenly felt myself
sinking, while the ropes rubbing against the edges of the coffin
elicited lugubrious sounds, as if a bow were being drawn across the
strings of a cracked violoncello. It was the end. On the left side of
my head I felt a violent shock like that produced by the bursting of a
bomb, with another under my feet and a third more violent still on my
chest. So forcible, indeed, was this last one that I thought the lid was
cleft atwain. I fainted from it.
CHAPTER IV
THE NAIL
It is impossible for me to say how long my swoon lasted. Eternity is not
of longer duration than one second spent in nihility. I was no more. It
was slowly and confusedly that I regained some degree of consciousness.
I was still asleep, but I began to dream; a nightmare started into shape
amid the blackness of my horizon, a nightmare compounded of a strange
fancy which in other days had haunted my morbid imagination whenever
with my propensity for dwelling upon hideous thoughts I had conjured up
catastrophes.
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