at a trial would deliver you into my hands; that, as a
prisoner I should hold you, I should have you; that there you could not
escape from me; that you had already possessed me a sufficiently long
time to give me the right to possess you in my turn. When one does
wrong, one must do it thoroughly. 'Tis madness to halt midway in the
monstrous! The extreme of crime has its deliriums of joy. A priest and a
witch can mingle in delight upon the truss of straw in a dungeon!

"Accordingly, I denounced you. It was then that I terrified you when
we met. The plot which I was weaving against you, the storm which I
was heaping up above your head, burst from me in threats and lightning
glances. Still, I hesitated. My project had its terrible sides which
made me shrink back.

"Perhaps I might have renounced it; perhaps my hideous thought would
have withered in my brain, without bearing fruit. I thought that
it would always depend upon me to follow up or discontinue this
prosecution. But every evil thought is inexorable, and insists on
becoming a deed; but where I believed myself to be all powerful, fate
was more powerful than I. Alas! 'tis fate which has seized you and
delivered you to the terrible wheels of the machine which I had
constructed doubly. Listen. I am nearing the end.

"One day,--again the sun was shining brilliantly--I behold man pass me
uttering your name and laughing, who carries sensuality in his eyes.
Damnation! I followed him; you know the rest."

He ceased.

The young girl could find but one word:

"Oh, my Phoebus!"

"Not that name!" said the priest, grasping her arm violently. "Utter not
that name! Oh! miserable wretches that we are, 'tis that name which has
ruined us! or, rather we have ruined each other by the inexplicable play
of fate! you are suffering, are you not? you are cold; the night makes
you blind, the dungeon envelops you; but perhaps you still have some
light in the bottom of your soul, were it only your childish love for
that empty man who played with your heart, while I bear the dungeon
within me; within me there is winter, ice, despair; I have night in my
soul.

"Do you know what I have suffered? I was present at your trial. I was
seated on the official's bench. Yes, under one of the priests' cowls,
there were the contortions of the damned. When you were brought in, I
was there; when you were questioned, I was there.--Den of wolves!--It
was my crime, it was my gallows that I beheld being