; that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy, had
handsomer doublets than ever, and a new mistress whom he was conducting
to see the old one hanged. His sneer redoubled its bitterness when he
reflected that out of the living beings whose death he had desired, the
gypsy, the only creature whom he did not hate, was the only one who had
not escaped him.

Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and there came
to him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He reflected that the people
also, the entire populace, had had before their eyes the woman whom he
loved exposed almost naked. He writhed his arms with agony as he thought
that the woman whose form, caught by him alone in the darkness would
have been supreme happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight at
full noonday, to a whole people, clad as for a night of voluptuousness.
He wept with rage over all these mysteries of love, profaned, soiled,
laid bare, withered forever. He wept with rage as he pictured to himself
how many impure looks had been gratified at the sight of that badly
fastened shift, and that this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this cup
of modesty and delight, to which he would have dared to place his lips
only trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl,
whereat the vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys, had
come to quaff in common an audacious, impure, and depraved pleasure.

And when he sought to picture to himself the happiness which he might
have found upon earth, if she had not been a gypsy, and if he had not
been a priest, if Phoebus had not existed and if she had loved him; when
he pictured to himself that a life of serenity and love would have been
possible to him also, even to him; that there were at that very moment,
here and there upon the earth, happy couples spending the hours in sweet
converse beneath orange trees, on the banks of brooks, in the presence
of a setting sun, of a starry night; and that if God had so willed,
he might have formed with her one of those blessed couples,--his heart
melted in tenderness and despair.

Oh! she! still she! It was this fixed idea which returned incessantly,
which tortured him, which ate into his brain, and rent his vitals. He
did not regret, he did not repent; all that he had done he was ready
to do again; he preferred to behold her in the hands of the executioner
rather than in the arms of the captain. But he suffered; he suffered
so th