where or how. I can do no more on earth
than lift my eyes a little to the edge of the world where I have
rolled.

Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. I
see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating
grass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment--I
know him by the white in his mane--rearing and whinnying like the true
battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly
unhappy are. Once again, I recall the red deer's little one, mutilated
on its carpet of fresh crimson, and the emotion which I had not on that
bygone day rises into my throat. Animals are innocence incarnate.
This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out
life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little
child, but a horse. My neck gives way, I utter a groan, and my face
gropes upon the ground.

The animal's start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearer
still to the man who was talking. He has unbent, and is lying on his
back. Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon's pallor, and
shows hideously that he is wounded in the neck. I feel that he is
going to die. His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings.
He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, and
some motionless portraits in the palaces--the Escurial, Spain, Europe.
Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in his
past:--

"Begone, you dreamers!" he says, louder than the stormy sky where the
flames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and the
harrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yet
continues to stone us.

He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:--

"The truth is revolutionary," gasps the nocturnal voice; "get you gone,
you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strew
words and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone! You bring in the reign
of men! But the multitude hates you and mocks you!"

He laughs, as if he heard the multitude's laughter.

And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely bigger
in the plain's black heart:--

"Wot's 'e sayin' now, that chap?"

"Let him be. You can see 'e knows more'n 'e says."

"Ah, la, la!"

I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and he
says to me very quietly:--

"I have confidence in the abyss of the people.