His marvellous energy, and the diseased state of nervous excitability he was in, sustained him. A mad fancy, born of all his misery and all his dreams, forced him out on that cruel night to his doom. He would seek his lost love; would appeal by all the slights, all the suffering, all the affronts he had endured, to her who had been and still was the arbitress of his life; would say to her: "All forsake me; I have only you. Tell me that you love me, and they will scorn me no more. Save me, Félicité Gauvrit!" Despite the dark night, the slippery ground, the two fences he had to climb, he went quickly along the track which bordered the park. Like a naughty child fearing pursuit, he turned his head every now and then to listen. Many a sound came to him, but it was only the whistling of the wind among the elms; the rain crashing down upon the slates; the roll of a distant train, probably on the way to Chalons. Mathurin descended the sloping meadow; the darkness was so dense that he had to turn back twice before he found the landing-stage. Feeling for a punt with his crutch he threw himself into the first one, and with a stroke of the pole pushed it out, not into the canal which led direct to Le Perrier and La Seulière, but to the left into a dyke rarely made use of by the occupants of the farm. The bottom of the boat was full of water; at each movement it washed over the limbs of the cowering man, but he heeded it not. What mattered the wet boat, the icy rain that was falling, the pitch darkness, the weeds that checked his progress many a time, the length of the way, the fatigue. He must reach her, did he strain his last nerve and die in the effort. The darkness was so great that Mathurin could scarce see the bow of his boat. Since sundown the wind had been driving the fog into the Marais; in its length and breadth it was full of it, covering whole spaces with its swaying mass; it lay over the inundated meadows, the embankments, and islets, shrouding them all in its malarial folds. It dripped in poisonous drops down poplars and willows, from the thatched roofs of hovels on the edge of the great sea shore where men, condemned to live in them, drank in fever without the power of struggling against it. On such a deadly night was it that Mathurin, already a prey to the malady hanging over him, the blood surging to his head, found his strength ebbing away. In vain he threw himself from side to side of the punt, unable to distinguish which way to go. Sometimes his breath failed, he grew unconscious, and the puntsman would sit leaning forward motionless in the boat; then the cold would restore him, and with a shake he would continue his course.