When I went into the waiting-room at the station at Loubain, the first
thing I did was to look at the clock, and I found that I had two hours
and ten minutes to wait for the Paris express.
I felt suddenly tired, as if I had walked twenty miles, and then I
looked about me as if I could find some means of killing the time on the
station walls, and at last I went out again, and stopped outside the
gates of the station, racking my brains to find something to do. The
street, which was a kind of a boulevard, planted with acacias, between
two rows of houses of unequal shape and different styles of
architecture, houses such as one only sees in a small town, ascended a
slight hill, and at the extreme end of it, there were some trees, as if
it ended in a park.
From time to time, a cat crossed the street, and jumped over the
gutters, carefully. A cur sniffed at every tree, and hunted for
fragments from the kitchens, but I did not see a single human being, and
I felt listless and disheartened. What could I do with myself? I was
already thinking of the inevitable and interminable visit to the small
_café_ at the railway station, where I should have to sit over a glass
of undrinkable beer and the illegible newspaper, when I saw a funeral
procession coming out of a side street into the one in which I was, and
the sight of the hearse was a relief to me. It would, at any rate, give
me something to do for ten minutes. Suddenly, however, my curiosity was
aroused. The corpse was followed by eight gentlemen, one of whom was
weeping, while the others were chatting together, but there was no
priest, and I thought to myself:
"This is a non-religious funeral," but then I reflected that a town like
Loubain must contain at least a hundred free-thinkers, who would have
made a point of making a manifestation. What could it be then? The rapid
pace of the procession clearly proved that the body was to be buried
without ceremony, and, consequently, without the intervention of
religion.
My idle curiosity framed the most complicated suppositions, and as the
hearse passed me, a strange idea struck me, which was to follow it, with
the eight gentlemen. That would take up my time for an hour, at least,
and I, accordingly, walked with the others, with a sad look on my face,
and on seeing this, the two last turned round in surprise, and then
spoke to each other in a low voice.
No doubt they were asking each other whether I belonged to the town, and
then they consulted the two in front of them, who stared at me in turn.
This close attention which they paid me, annoyed me, and to put an end
to it, I went up to them, and, after bowing, I said:
"I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for interrupting your conversation, but
seeing a civil funeral, I have followed it, although I did not know the
deceased gentleman whom you are accompanying."
"It is a woman," one of them said.