He suddenly recollected the tears of the night at Folkestone, and the tears, also, at their last interview; and, as though he had at last understood their meaning, he could find within him but a single utterance, which he whispered there in the restaurant filled with the smoke of cigars, then beneath the leafless trees of the Tuileries, then in the solitude of his own room in the Rue Vaneau--a single utterance, but one filled with the perception of the degrading fatalities of his life: "What misery! My God, what misery!" CHAPTER XI What was Theresa doing while he was suffering thus, and why did she afford him no sign of her existence? Although the young man had forbidden himself to think about her, he thought of her nevertheless, and this question came to add anxiety to his other anguish. Contradictory hypotheses passed in turns through his mind. Had Theresa died of remorse? Had she ceased to love him? Had she kept La Croix-Firmin for her lover? Was she pursuing a fresh intrigue. Everything seemed possible to Hubert, the worst as well as the best, on the part of this woman whom he had learned to be so strangely compounded of refinement and libertinism, of treachery and nobility. He then ascertained by the heart-burning caused him by some of his hypotheses, by what living fibres he still clung to this being from whom he wished himself released. He was on the point of taking some steps in order at least to learn what the inclinations of her own soul were at that moment; then he despised himself for the weakness, and, to strengthen himself, he repeated some verses which were in correspondence with his condition of mind. He found them, by a strange irony of destiny which he did not suspect, in the single collection of poetry by Alfred Fanières. This volume, which had been reprinted after the poet's novels had made him celebrated, bore a title which was in itself a revelation of youthfulness: "Early Pride." Hubert had dined, in company with the writer, at Madame de Sauve's house without suspecting what the poor woman felt at being obliged by her husband to receive at her table the lover whom she idolised and the man with whom she had broken. Fanières had talked cleverly that evening, and it was after that dinner that the young man, with very natural curiosity, had obtained the book of verse at a bookseller's. The poem which pleased him just now was a sonnet, somewhat pretentiously called "Tender Cruelty":--