collected the hour and minute of the
merest trifles, which are forgotten from one day to the next. In night
and fog they had seen and recognized people, their features, their
gestures, the color of their clothes. They had heard speaking,
whispering, sighing, through thick walls. A beggar by the name of
Laville, who used to sleep in Missonier's stable, had heard not only
the organ-grinders but also four men carrying a burden, something like
men dragging a barrel. Bastide Grammont laughed repeatedly at
statements which he declared to be shameless lies. When the Bancal
woman began her testimony he remarked that since it came so late he had
expected that the old woman would be delivered of it with still greater
difficulty. To another witness he represented, in a vibrating voice,
how the hand of Heaven rested heavy upon her, and reminded her of the
awful death of her child. He was like a fencer whose opponent is the
mist; nobody, indeed, replied to him, he stood alone, the
contradictions which he believed he had demonstrated remained there,
that was all. At first he was self-confident and maintained his
composure, looked firmly into the witnesses' faces; then he felt as if
his sense for the significance of words were leaving him, not alone for
his own but for that of all the words in existence, or as if the ground
were giving way under him and he were falling irresistibly from space
to space into an awful, infinite, boundless void. His mind refused to
work; he asked himself, horrified, whether this was still life, dared
call itself life; Nature's glorious structure seemed to him ravaged
like a wall rent by a storm, the speaking mouth of all these people
struck him as nothing but a chasm convulsively and repellently opening
and shutting, darkness invaded his spirit, he burned with a feeling of
shame, he felt ashamed in the name of the nameless God, ashamed that
his body was molded like that of these creatures around him. He had
loved the world, had once loved the people in it; now he was ashamed of
them. It pained him to think that he had ever cherished hopes, buoyed
up his heart with promises, that sunshine and sky had ever been able to
lure from him a joyful glance, sportive words a smile; he wished he
had, like the stone by the wayside, never betrayed what he felt, so
that he might not have been doomed to bear witness before his own
branded, scourged, unspeakably humiliated self. Thought alone seemed
offensive enough to him