at if he had to open his
lips he would break out into horrible and aimless imprecations, start
breaking furniture, smashing china and glass. From the moment he opened
the private door and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of a winding
staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he
went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated
madman with blood-shot eyes and a foaming mouth played inconceivable
havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed
dining-room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over,
and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs
of the chairs while crossing the room to reach a low and broad divan
on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still
greater. That brutality of feeling which he had known only when
charging the enemy, sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not
recognize in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. But in
his mental and bodily exhaustion this passion got cleared, distilled,
refined into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to
die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.

That night, General D'Hubert stretched out on his back with his hands
over his eyes, or lying on his breast with his face buried in a
cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at
the absurdity of the situation, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his
existence, and mistrust of his best sentiments (for what the devil did
he want to go to Fouche for?)--he knew them all in turn. "I am an
idiot, neither more nor less," he thought--"A sensitive idiot. Because
I overheard two men talking in a cafe. . . . I am an idiot afraid of
lies--whereas in life it is only truth that matters."

Several times he got up and, walking in his socks in order not to be
heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the
dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry
somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud,
the awful persistence of that imbecile brute, came to him with the
tremendous force of a relentless destiny. General D'Hubert trembled as
he put down the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General
D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in
his dry mouth the faint sickly flavour of fear, not the excusable fear
before a young girl's candid