ind at the time of the greatest
catastrophes.

But the agonized cry of Mother Roque pierced his heart. At that moment
he had felt inclined to cast himself at the old woman's feet and to
exclaim:

"I am the guilty one!"

But he had restrained himself. He went back, however, during the night
to fish up the dead girl's wooden shoes, in order to place them on her
mother's threshold.

As long as the inquiry lasted, as long as it was necessary to lead
justice astray he was calm, master of himself, crafty and smiling. He
discussed quietly with 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