aw trough the
window the stars shining with that piercing brightness that they
have on frosty nights.

Then the idea that had obsessed me for a month rose again to the
surface. As soon as I was quiet it came to me and harassed me. It
ate into my mind like a fixed idea, just as cancers must eat into
the flesh. It was there, in my head, in my heart, in my whole body,
it seemed to me; and it swallowed me up as a wild beast might have.
I endeavored to drive it away, to repulse it, to open my mind to
other thoughts, as one opens a window to the fresh morning breeze to
drive out the vitiated air; but I could not drive it from my brain,
not even for a second. I do not know how to express this torture.
It gnawed at my soul, and I felt a frightful pain, a real physical
and moral pain.

My life was ruined! How could I escape from this situation? How
could I draw back, and how could I confess?

And I loved the one who was to become your mother with a mad
passion, which this insurmountable obstacle only aggravated.

A terrible rage was taking possession of me, choking me, a rage that
verged on madness! Surely I was crazy that evening!

The child was sleeping. I got up and looked at it as it slept. It
was he, this abortion, this spawn, this nothing, that condemned me
to irremediable unhappiness!

He was asleep, his mouth open, wrapped in his bed-clothes in a crib
beside my bed, where I could not sleep.

How did I ever do what I did? How do I know? What force urged me
on? What malevolent power took possession of me? Oh! the
temptation to crime came to me without any forewarning. All I
recall is that my heart beat tumultuously. It beat so hard that I
could hear it, as one hears the strokes of a hammer behind a
partition. That is all I can recall--the beating of my heart!
In my head there was a strange confusion, a tumult, a senseless
disorder, a lack of presence of mind. It was one of those hours of
bewilderment and hallucination when a man is neither conscious of
his actions nor able to guide his will.

I gently raised the coverings from the body of the child; I turned
them down to the foot of the crib, and he lay there uncovered and
naked.

He did not wake. Then I went toward the window, softly, quite
softly, and I opened it.

A breath of icy air glided in like an assassin; it was so cold that
I dr