Poor Renaud! the victim of all the involuntary falsehoods which, starting from ourselves, one engendering another, sometimes render the best of us irresponsible and drive us on to disaster when passion makes us mad. This chain, often undiscoverable, of false but specious reasons with which men deceive themselves, each fitting into the last without violence, each explaining and justifying the one that follows it--leads insensibly to acts incomprehensible to him who is not able to follow it back, link by link. It is the chain of FATALITY, in which the links, consisting of trifling but suggestive facts, of decisive circumstances, unknown sometimes to the culprit, alternate with the fictitious good motives he has invented for his own benefit in the reflex movements of his mind. To re-establish the logical sequence of facts, of sensations suddenly transformed into ideas, is the work of equity which reasons, or of love which divines. In default of tracing back the chain of insensible, imperious transitions, we find between the criminal who has long been an honest man and his crime, the abyss at sight of which fools and unthinking folk, filled with the pride of implacable sinners, never fail to exclaim: "It is monstrous!" But if God, infinite Love, does exist, everything is forgiven, because everything is understood; there are, mayhap, simply the miserable wretches on one side, and divine pity on the other. Yes, Renaud would have killed the sorceress, with savage joy, to avenge Livette. But was not that desire, which he deemed a praiseworthy one, simply a pretext for seeking her out again that same day, for seeing her once more?--That, at all events, is what the devil himself thought as he crouched on the floor of the crypt in the church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the spot occupied the day before by the dark-browed gipsies, beneath the shrine of Saint Sara. And so, mounted upon Blanchet, Renaud galloped furiously away upon his tracks of the night, intending to kill Zinzara.