consisting in crossing his
arms, and that he was an idiot not to enjoy this bliss in peace. But his
reasoning exploded in the face of facts. He was constrained to confess,
at the bottom of his heart, that this idleness rendered his anguish
the more cruel, by leaving him every hour of his life to ponder on the
despair and deepen its incurable bitterness. Laziness, that brutish
existence which had been his dream, proved his punishment. At moments,
he ardently hoped for some occupation to draw him from his thoughts.
Then he lost all energy, relapsing beneath the weight of implacable
fatality that bound his limbs so as to more surely crush him.

In truth, he only found some relief when beating Therese, at night. This
brutality alone relieved him of his enervated anguish.

But his keenest suffering, both physical and moral, came from the bite
Camille had given him in the neck. At certain moments, he imagined that
this scar covered the whole of his body. If he came to forget the past,
he all at once fancied he felt a burning puncture, that recalled the
murder both to his frame and mind.

When under the influence of emotion, he could not stand before
a looking-glass without noticing this phenomenon which he had so
frequently remarked and which always terrified him; the blood flew to
his neck, purpling the scar, which then began to gnaw the skin.

This sort of wound that lived upon him, which became active, flushed,
and biting at the slightest trouble, frightened and tortured him. He
ended by believing that the teeth of the drowned man had planted an
insect there which was devouring him. The part of his neck where the
scar appeared, seemed to him to no longer belong to his body; it
was like foreign flesh that had been stuck in this place, a piece of
poisoned meat that was rotting his own muscles.

In this manner, he carried the living and devouring recollection of his
crime about with him everywhere. When he beat Therese, she endeavoured
to scratch the spot, and sometimes dug her nails into it making him howl
with pain. She generally pretended to sob, as soon as she caught sight
of the bite, so as to make it more insufferable to Laurent. All her
revenge for his brutality, consisted in martyrising him in connection
with this bite.

While shaving, he had frequently been tempted to give himself a gash
in the neck, so as to make the marks of the teeth of the drowned man
disappear. When, standing before the mirror, he raised h