oy in holding you
here, monster! Not to avenge myself, but to avenge your victims,--yes, I
shall have accomplished a duty when, with my own hands, I shall have
punished my accomplice. A voice says to me, that, if you had fallen into
my power earlier, much blood, much blood would have been spared. I have
now a horror of my past murders; and yet, is it not strange? It is
without fear, it is even with security, that I am now about to
perpetrate on you a fearful murder, with most fearful refinements. Say,
say! Do you understand that?"

"Bravo! Well played, old No-Eyes! He gets on," exclaimed Tortillard,
applauding. "It is really something to laugh at."

"To laugh at?" continued the Schoolmaster, in a hollow voice. "Keep
still, Chouette; I must complete my explanation as to how I gradually
came to repentance. This revelation will be hateful to you, heart of
stone, and will prove to you also how remorseless I ought to be in the
vengeance which I should wreak on you in the name of our victims. I must
be quick. My delight at grasping you thus makes my blood throb in my
veins,--my temples beat with violence, just as when, by thinking of my
dream, my reason wanders. Perhaps one of my crises will come on; but I
shall have time to make the approaches of death frightful to you by
compelling you to hear me."

"At him, Chouette!" cried Tortillard. "At him! And reply boldly! Why,
you don't know your part. Tell the 'old one' to prompt you, my worthy
elderly damsel."

"It is useless for you to struggle and bite me," said the Schoolmaster,
after another pause. "You shall not escape me,--you have bitten my
fingers to the bone; but I will pull your tongue out, if you stir. Let
us continue our discourse. When I have been alone--alone in the night
and silence--I have begun to experience fits of furious, impotent rage;
and, for the first time, my senses wandered. Oh! though I was awake, I
again dreamed the dream--you know--the dream. The little old man in the
Rue du Roule, the drowned woman, the cattle-dealer, and you--soaring
over these phantoms! I tell you it was horrible! I am blind, and my
thoughts assume a form, a body, in order to represent to me incessantly,
and in a visible, palpable manner, the features of my victims. I should
not have dreamed this fearful vision, had not my mind, continually
absorbed by the remembrance of my past crimes, been troubled with the
same fantasies. Unquestionably, when one is deprived of sight, the ide