the magistrates all the suppositions that passed
through their minds, combated their opinions and demolished their
arguments. He even took a keen and mournful pleasure in disturbing their
investigations, in embroiling their ideas, in showing the innocence of
those whom they suspected.

But as soon as the inquiry was abandoned he became gradually nervous,
more excitable than he had been before, although he mastered his
irritability. Sudden noises made him start with fear; he shuddered at the
slightest thing and trembled sometimes from head to foot when a fly
alighted on his forehead. Then he was seized with an imperious desire for
motion, which impelled him to take long walks and to remain up whole
nights pacing up and down his room.

It was not that he was goaded by remorse. His brutal nature did not lend
itself to any shade of sentiment or of moral terror. A man of energy and
even of violence, born to make war, to ravage conquered countries and to
massacre the vanquished, full of the savage instincts of the hunter and
the fighter, he scarcely took count of human life. Though he respected
the Church outwardly, from policy, he believed neither in God nor the
devil, expecting neither chastisement nor recompense for his acts in
another life. His sole belief was a vague philosophy drawn from all the
ideas of the encyclopedists of the last century, and he regarded religion
as a moral sanction of the law, the one and the other having been
invented by men to regulate social relations. To kill any one in a duel,
or in war, or in a quarrel, or by accident, or for the sake of revenge,
or even through bravado would have seemed to him an amusing and clever
thing and would not have left more impression on his mind than a shot
fired at a hare; but he had experienced a profound emotion at the murder
of this child. He had, in the first place, perpetrated it in the heat of
an irresistible gust of passion, in a sort of tempest of the senses that
had overpowered his reason. And he had cherished in his heart, in his
flesh, on his lips, even to the very tips of his murderous fingers a kind
of bestial love, as well as a feeling of terrified horror, toward this
little girl surprised by him and basely killed. Every moment his thoughts
returned to that horrible scene, and, though he endeavored to drive this
picture from his mind, though he put it aside with terror, with disgust,
he felt it surging through his soul, moving about in him, waiting