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. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert
was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth
the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a
young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the
honourable man's fear of cowardice.

But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from
which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D'Hubert had
the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life. He had
charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with
messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about
it. His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to
an obscure and revolting death. General D'Hubert never hesitated. He
carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.
Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again. He picked two
oranges. It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a
slight faintness.

He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained
the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a
colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of
brown trunks and its dark-green canopy