Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/539

Rh but I have not lived alone on earth. I had the powerful idea of duty. The duty which rightly or wrongly I laid down for myself, has been to me like the trunk of a solid tree which I could lean on during the storm, I stumbled, I was agitated. After all I was only a man, but I was not swept away.

"It must be the damp air of this cell which made me think of being alone.

"Why should I still play the hypocrite by cursing hypocrisy? It is neither death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, but madame de Rênal's absence which prostrates me. If, in order to see her at Verrières, I had to live whole weeks at Verrières concealed in the cellars of her house, would I complain?"

"The influence of my contemporaries wins the day," he said aloud, with a bitter laugh. "Though I am talking to myself and within an ace of death, I still play the hypocrite. Oh you nineteenth century! A hunter fires a gun shot in the forest, his quarry falls, he hastens forward to seize it. His foot knocks against a two-foot anthill, knocks down the dwelling place of the ants, and scatters the ants and their eggs far and wide. The most philosophic among the ants will never be able to understand that black, gigantic and terrifying body, the hunter's boot, which suddenly invaded their home with incredible rapidity, preceded by a frightful noise, and accompanied by flashes of reddish fire."

"In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o'clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o'clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word 'night'?"

"Give it five more hours of existence, and it will see night, and understand its meaning."

"So, in my case, I shall die at the age of twenty-three. Give me five more years of life in order to live with madame de Rênal."

He began to laugh like Mephistopheles. How foolish to debate these great problems.

"(1). I am as hypocritical as though there were someone there to listen to me.

"(2). I am forgetting to live and to love when I have so few days left to live. Alas, madame de Rênal is absent;