oque, the little girl he had
attacked and afterward strangled.

Every night the odious vision came back again. First he seemed to hear a
kind of roaring sound, such as is made by a threshing machine or the
distant passage of a train over a bridge. Then he commenced to gasp, to
suffocate, and he had to unbutton his collar and his belt. He moved about
to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he attempted to sing. It
was in vain. His thoughts, in spite of himself, went back to the day of
the murder and made him begin it all over again in all its most secret
details, with all the violent emotions he had experienced from the first
minute to the last.

He had felt on rising that morning, the morning of the horrible day, a
little dizziness and headache, which he attributed to the heat, so that
he remained in his room until breakfast time.

After the meal he had taken a siesta, then, toward the close of the
afternoon, he had gone out to breathe the fresh, soothing breeze under
the trees in the wood.

But, as soon as he was outside, the heavy, scorching air of the plain
oppressed him still more. The sun, still high in the heavens, poured down
on the parched soil waves of burning light. Not a breath of wind stirred
the leaves. Every beast and bird, even the grasshoppers, were silent.
Renardet reached the tall trees and began to walk over the moss where the
Brindille produced a slight freshness of the air beneath the immense roof
of branches. But he felt ill at ease. It seemed to him that an unknown,
invisible hand was strangling him, and he scarcely thought of anything,
having usually few ideas in his head. For the last three months only one
thought haunted him, the thought of marrying again. He suffered from
living alone, suffered from it morally and physically. Accustomed for ten
years past to feeling a woman near him, habituated to her presence every
moment, he had need, an imperious and perplexing need of such
association. Since Madame Renardet's death he had suffered continually
without knowing why, he had suffered at not feeling her dress brushing
past him, and, above all, from no longer being able to calm and rest
himself in her arms. He had been scarcely six months a widower and he was
already looking about in the district for some young girl or some widow
he might marry when his period of mourning was at an end.

He had a chaste soul, but it was lodged in a powerful, herculean body,
and carnal imaginings began