which he had been struggling these three days, but the dread of an
overpowering horror; the dread that he himself should believe that Jean,
his brother, was that man's son.

No. He did not believe it, he could not even ask himself the question
which was a crime! Meanwhile he must get rid of this faint suspicion,
improbable as it was, utterly and forever. He craved for light, for
certainty--he must win absolute security in his heart, for he loved no
one in the world but his mother. And as he wandered alone through the
darkness he would rack his memory and his reason with a minute search
that should bring out the blazing truth. Then there would be an end
to the matter; he would not think of it again--never. He would go and
sleep.

He argued thus: "Let me see: first to examine the facts; then I will
recall all I know about him, his behaviour to my brother and to me. I
will seek out the causes which might have given rise to the preference.
He knew Jean from his birth? Yes, but he had known me first. If he had
loved my mother silently, unselfishly, he would surely have chosen me,
since it was through me, through my scarlet fever, that he became so
intimate with my parents. Logically, then, he ought to have preferred
me, to have had a keener affection for me--unless it were that he felt
an instinctive attraction and predilection for my brother as he watched
him grow up."

Then, with desperate tension of brain and of all the powers of his
intellect, he strove to reconstitute from memory the image of this
Marechal, to see him, to know him, to penetrate the man whom he had seen
pass by him, indifferent to his heart during all those years in Paris.

But he perceived that the slight exertion of walking somewhat disturbed
his ideas, dislocated their continuity, weakened their precision,
clouded his recollection. To enable him to look at the past and at
unknown events with so keen an eye that nothing should escape it, he
must be motionless in a vast and empty space. And he made up his mind
to go and sit on the jetty as he had done that other night. As he
approached the harbour he heard, out at sea, a lugubrious and sinister
wail like the bellowing of a bull, but more long-drawn and steady. It
was the roar of a fog-horn, the cry of a ship lost in the fog. A shiver
ran through him, chilling his heart; so deeply did this cry of distress
thrill his soul and nerves that he felt as if he had uttered it himself.
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