Some hot wine had been made in a salad-bowl because the coffee affected the ladies' nerves too much.

The conversation became tenderly effusive.

Virginie talked of the country: she would like to be buried at the corner of a wood with wild flowers on her grave.

Madame Lerat had already put by in her wardrobe the sheet for her shroud, and she kept it perfumed with a bunch of lavender; she wished always to have a nice smell under her nose when she would be eating the dandelions by the roots.

Then, with no sort of transition, the policeman related that he had arrested a fine girl that morning who had been stealing from a pork-butcher's shop; on undressing her at the commissary of police's they had found ten sausages hanging round her body.