slowly reared over
your head. I was there for every witness, every proof, every plea; I
could count each of your steps in the painful path; I was still there
when that ferocious beast--oh! I had not foreseen torture! Listen.
I followed you to that chamber of anguish. I beheld you stripped and
handled, half naked, by the infamous hands of the tormentor. I beheld
your foot, that foot which I would have given an empire to kiss and die,
that foot, beneath which to have had my head crushed I should have felt
such rapture,--I beheld it encased in that horrible boot, which converts
the limbs of a living being into one bloody clod. Oh, wretch! while
I looked on at that, I held beneath my shroud a dagger, with which I
lacerated my breast. When you uttered that cry, I plunged it into my
flesh; at a second cry, it would have entered my heart. Look! I believe
that it still bleeds."

He opened his cassock. His breast was in fact, mangled as by the claw of
a tiger, and on his side he had a large and badly healed wound.

The prisoner recoiled with horror.

"Oh!" said the priest, "young girl, have pity upon me! You think
yourself unhappy; alas! alas! you know not what unhappiness is. Oh! to
love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated! to love with all the fury
of one's soul; to feel that one would give for the least of her
smiles, one's blood, one's vitals, one's fame, one's salvation, one's
immortality and eternity, this life and the other; to regret that one
is not a king, emperor, archangel, God, in order that one might place
a greater slave beneath her feet; to clasp her night and day in one's
dreams and one's thoughts, and to behold her in love with the trappings
of a soldier and to have nothing to offer her but a priest's dirty
cassock, which will inspire her with fear and disgust! To be present
with one's jealousy and one's rage, while she lavishes on a miserable,
blustering imbecile, treasures of love and beauty! To behold that body
whose form burns you, that bosom which possesses so much sweetness, that
flesh palpitate and blush beneath the kisses of another! Oh heaven! to
love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to think of her blue veins, of her
brown skin, until one writhes for whole nights together on the pavement
of one's cell, and to behold all those caresses which one has dreamed
of, end in torture! To have succeeded only in stretching her upon the
leather bed! Oh! these are the veritable pincers, reddened in the fires
o