rst, but that grew more firm as he
proceeded.

"Monsieur le President, gentlemen of the jury: I have very little to say.
The woman whose grave I violated was my sweetheart. I loved her.

"I loved her, not with a sensual love and not with mere tenderness of
heart and soul, but with an absolute, complete love, with an overpowering
passion.

"Hear me:

"When I met her for the first time I felt a strange sensation. It was not
astonishment nor admiration, nor yet that which is called love at first
sight, but a feeling of delicious well-being, as if I had been plunged
into a warm bath. Her gestures seduced me, her voice enchanted me, and it
was with infinite pleasure that I looked upon her person. It seemed to me
as if I had seen her before and as if I had known her a long time. She
had within her something of my spirit.

"She seemed to me like an answer to a cry uttered by my soul, to that
vague and unceasing cry with which we call upon Hope during our whole
life.

"When I knew her a little better, the mere thought of seeing her again
filled me with exquisite and profound uneasiness; the touch of her hand
in mine was more delightful to me than anything that I had imagined; her
smile filled me with a mad joy, with the desire to run, to dance, to
fling myself upon the ground.

"So we became lovers.

"Yes, more than that: she was my very life. I looked for nothing further
on earth, and had no further desires. I longed for nothing further.

"One evening, when we had gone on a somewhat long walk by the river, we
were overtaken by the rain, and she caught cold. It developed into
pneumonia the next day, and a week later she was dead.

"During the hours of her suffering astonishment and consternation
prevented my understanding and reflecting upon it, but when she was dead
I was so overwhelmed by blank despair that I had no thoughts left. I
wept.

"During all the horrible details of the interment my keen and wild grief
was like a madness, a kind of sensual, physical grief.

"Then when she was gone, when she was under the earth, my mind at once
found itself again, and I passed through a series of moral sufferings so
terrible that even the love she had vouchsafed to me was dear at that
price.

"Then the fixed idea came to me: I shall not see her again.

"When one dwells on this thought for a whole day one feels as if he were
going mad. Just think of it! There is a woman whom you adore, a unique
woman, for in the whol