"Nonsense, nonsense, you old dodger! I know all about your string!"
"But they've found the wallet!" faltered Hauchecorne.
"None of that, old boy; there's one who finds it, and there's one who
carries it back. I don't know just how you did it, but I understand
you."
The peasant was fairly stunned. He understood at last. He was accused
of having sent the wallet back by a confederate, an accomplice.
He tried to protest. The whole table began to laugh.
He could not finish his dinner, but left the inn amid a chorus of
jeers.
He returned home, shamefaced and indignant, suffocated by wrath, by
confusion, and all the more cast down because, with his Norman cunning,
he was quite capable of doing the thing with which he was charged, and
even of boasting of it as a shrewd trick. He had a confused idea that
his innocence was impossible to establish, his craftiness being so well
known. And he was cut to the heart by the injustice of the suspicion.
Thereupon he began once more to tell of the adventure, making the story
longer each day, adding each time new arguments, more forcible
protestations, more solemn oaths, which he devised and prepared in his
hours of solitude, his mind being wholly engrossed by the story of the
string. The more complicated his defence and the more subtle his
reasoning, the less he was believed.
"Those are a liar's reasons," people said behind his back.
He realized it: he gnawed his nails, and exhausted himself in vain
efforts.
He grew perceptibly thinner.
Now the jokers asked him to tell the story of "The Piece of String" for
their amusement, as a soldier who has seen service is asked to tell
about his battles. His mind, attacked at its source, grew feebler.
Late in December he took to his bed.
In the first days of January he died, and in his delirium, of the death
agony, he protested his innocence, repeating:
"A little piece of string—a little piece of string—see, here it is,
m'sieu' mayor."