He began to use this remedy at night when he fell under the influence
of certain ideas; during the day when applying himself to work, by
an effort of will he escaped from these ideas, and was the man he had
always been, master of his strength and mind. But the action of the
morphine rapidly weakened this all-powerful will, so much so, that when
these ideas crossed his mind during his working hours he had not the
energy to drive them away. He tried to shake them off, but in vain; they
would not leave his brain, to which they clung and encompassed it with
increasing strength.

Truly, those two corpses troubled him horribly. Was it not exasperating
for a man who had seen and dissected so many, that there should be
always two before his eyes, even when they were closed--that of this old
rascal and of this unfortunate woman? In order not to complicate this
impression with another that humiliated him, he got rid of the packages
of bank bills taken from Caffie, by sending them "as restitution" to the
director of public charities. But this had no appreciable effect.

The thought of Florentin troubled him also; and if he saw Caffie lying
in his chair, Madame Dammauville motionless and pink on her bed, to him
it was not less cruel to see Florentin between the decks of the vessel
that would soon carry him to New Caledonia.

The ideas on conscience that he had expressed at Crozat's, and those
that he explained to Phillis about remorse, were still his; but he was
not the less certain that these two dead persons and the condemned one
weighed upon him with a terrible weight, frightful, suffocating, like
a nightmare. It was not in accordance with his education nor with his
environment to have these corpses behind him and this victim before him.

But where his former ideas were overthrown, since these dead bodies
seized hold of his life, was in his confidence in his strength.

The strong man that he believed himself, he who follows his ambition
regardless of things and of persons, looking only before him and never
behind, master of his mind as of his heart and of his arm, was not at
all the one that reality revealed.

On the contrary, he had been weak in action and yet weaker afterward.

And it was not only humiliation in the present that he felt in
acknowledging this weakness, it was also in uneasiness for the future;
for, if he lacked this strength that he attributed to himself before
having tested it, he should, if his beliefs