ight bird let loose and
pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no longer knew
where he was, what he thought, or whether he were dreaming. He went
forward, walking, running, taking any street at haphazard, making no
choice, only urged ever onward away from the Greve, the horrible Greve,
which he felt confusedly, to be behind him.

In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Genevieve, and finally emerged
from the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight as long
as he could see, when he turned round, the turreted enclosure of the
University, and the rare houses of the suburb; but, when, at length, a
rise of ground had completely concealed from him that odious Paris, when
he could believe himself to be a hundred leagues distant from it, in the
fields, in the desert, he halted, and it seemed to him that he breathed
more freely.

Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see clearly
into his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that unhappy girl who had
destroyed him, and whom he had destroyed. He cast a haggard eye over the
double, tortuous way which fate had caused their two destinies to pursue
up to their point of intersection, where it had dashed them against each
other without mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, on
the vanity of chastity, of science, of religion, of virtue, on the
uselessness of God. He plunged to his heart's content in evil thoughts,
and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a Satanic laugh burst forth
within him.

And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived how
large a space nature had prepared there for the passions, he sneered
still more bitterly. He stirred up in the depths of his heart all his
hatred, all his malevolence; and, with the cold glance of a physician
who examines a patient, he recognized the fact that this malevolence
was nothing but vitiated love; that love, that source of every virtue in
man, turned to horrible things in the heart of a priest, and that a man
constituted like himself, in making himself a priest, made himself a
demon. Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again,
when he considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that
corrosive, venomous malignant, implacable love, which had ended only in
the gibbet for one of them and in hell for the other; condemnation for
her, damnation for him.

And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phoebus
was alive