It was the revolt of
jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared,
fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having,
perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched 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, dread of the fate that could play such
a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently
insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, 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 talk 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 about in his socks, so as 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 fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down
the empty water ewer.
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