n the joints
of the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred with
grey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread out
into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.

"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered,
into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide
into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn
through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in
which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine
triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents.
This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks
frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers,
membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an
arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.

"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.

"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered
by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion
that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his
hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad,
violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.

"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees,
and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a
response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk,
weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted,
an inert mass.

"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric
enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the
coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the
leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds
are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and--in an awful silence--the
incubi and succubi pass.

"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to
the larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the blood
bursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the
crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to
the feet of the Christ.

"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose
convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity,
supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, an