He rose, and spent the morning among his books, opening but not reading them. He lunched, and the sight of his mother irritated, instead of softening him. He went back to his room, and resumed the dull idleness of the morning. He dined, and then, immediately after dinner, left the drawing-room, so as not to encounter either the General or his cousin, whose presence was intolerable to him. At night he lay awake, continuing to see the accursed scene with the same impossibility of arriving at relaxation of grief. If he fell asleep, he had every second time to endure the nightmare of this same vision. As he had no conception of the physiognomy of the man with whom his mistress had deceived him, there rose up in his morbid sleep horrible dreams wherein all kinds of different faces were mingled together. The distress which such imagining caused him would awake him. His body would be bathed in sweat, he could feel a rending of the bosom as though his quick-beating heart were about to leave its place, and with this suffering there was, as before, such complete prostration of his affectionate powers, that he was not even anxious to know what had become of Theresa. "After all," he said to himself one morning as he was getting up, "I lived well enough before I knew her! I have only to put myself again in thought into the condition in which I was before that 12th of October." He had an exact recollection of the date. "It was scarcely more than a year ago; I was so tranquil then! I have had an evil dream, that is all. But I must destroy everything that might bring back the memory of it to me." He sat down before his writing table after putting fresh wood upon the fire to increase the blaze, and double-locking the door. Involuntarily, he recollected that he used so to act formerly, when he wished to see the precious treasure of his love-relics again. He opened the drawer in which the treasure was hidden: it consisted of a black morocco box, on which were entwined two initial letters--a "T." and an "H." Theresa and he had exchanged two of these boxes, to keep their letters in them. Upon the one which he had given to his mistress he had caused Theresa's name to be autographed in full, instead of the two initials. "What a child I was!" he thought, as he recollected the thousand little weaknesses of this order in which he had indulged. There is always puerility, indeed, in extreme weaknesses; but it is on the day when we are on the road to hardness of heart that we think so.