God that he will do penance. He promises to found pious
institutions. He does establish, at Machecoul, a boys' academy in honour
of the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister,
of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.

"But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas superpose themselves on
each other, then pass away, and those which disappear leave their shadow
on those which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with distress, he
precipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurls
himself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his
finger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes a spiked club and
crushes the skull. And while the gurgling blood runs over him, he
stands, smeared with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs.
Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his henchmen remove
the crimson stains from the ground and dispose prudently of the corpse
and the reeking garments.

"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable
forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as
he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost
him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the
aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his
very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the
motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.

"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its
root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart,
subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided and
re-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a
stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from
bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a
phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on
the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy
belly of the earth.

"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the
lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender
beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the
dark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations of
the branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark,
simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a beast. I