at at intervals he tore out handfuls of his hair to see whether it
were not turning white.

Among other moments there came one, when it occurred to him that it was
perhaps the very minute when the hideous chain which he had seen
that morning, was pressing its iron noose closer about that frail and
graceful neck. This thought caused the perspiration to start from every
pore.

There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself,
he represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen her on that
first day, lively, careless, joyous, gayly attired, dancing, winged,
harmonious, and la Esmeralda of the last day, in her scanty shift, with
a rope about her neck, mounting slowly with her bare feet, the angular
ladder of the gallows; he figured to himself this double picture in such
a manner that he gave vent to a terrible cry.

While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore up, bent,
uprooted everything in his soul, he gazed at nature around him. At his
feet, some chickens were searching the thickets and pecking, enamelled
beetles ran about in the sun; overhead, some groups of dappled gray
clouds were floating across the blue sky; on the horizon, the spire
of the Abbey Saint-Victor pierced the ridge of the hill with its slate
obelisk; and the miller of the Copeaue hillock was whistling as he
watched the laborious wings of his mill turning. All this active,
organized, tranquil life, recurring around him under a thousand forms,
hurt him. He resumed his flight.

He sped thus across the fields until evening. This flight from nature,
life, himself, man, God, everything, lasted all day long. Sometimes he
flung himself face downward on the earth, and tore up the young blades
of wheat with his nails. Sometimes he halted in the deserted street of
a village, and his thoughts were so intolerable that he grasped his head
in both hands and tried to tear it from his shoulders in order to dash
it upon the pavement.

Towards the hour of sunset, he examined himself again, and found himself
nearly mad. The tempest which had raged within him ever since the
instant when he had lost the hope and the will to save the gypsy,--that
tempest had not left in his conscience a single healthy idea, a single
thought which maintained its upright position. His reason lay there
almost entirely destroyed. There remained but two distinct images in his
mind, la Esmeralda and the gallows; all the rest was blank. Those two
images united