"To the possessing! Yes, to enjoy that even to the last moment for which you have braved privations, infamy, the scaffold; yes, to say once more, the head under the ax, 'I possess!' Oh! do you see, death is sweet compared to the torments that are endured on seeing one's self during life dispossessed, as I am, of all that I have amassed at the price of so much pain, so much danger! Oh! to say, at each moment of the day, 'I, who had more than a million--I, who have endured every privation to preserve it--I, who in ten years would have doubled it, tripled it--I have no longer anything. It is cruel! it is to die, not each day, but each moment of the day. Yes, to this horrible agony, which may endure for years, perhaps, I would have preferred death a thousand times. Once more, I could have said in dying, 'I possess.'" Polidori looked at his accomplice with profound astonishment. "I cannot comprehend you. Then why have you obeyed the commands of him who might have caused your head to roll from the scaffold? Why have you preferred life, without your treasure, if this life seems so horrible to you?" "It is, do you see," answered the notary, in a voice sunk to a whisper, "it is not the thought of death--it is annihilation. And Cecily!" "And you hope!" cried Polidori, astonished. "I hope not; I possess---" "What?" "The remembrance." "But you will never see her again; she has delivered up your head!" "But I love her still, and more madly than ever," cried Jacques Ferrand, with an explosion of tears, of sobs, which strangely contrasted with the calmness of his last words. "Yes, I love her always, and I do not wish to die, so that I can plunge myself deeper and deeper with wild delight into this furnace where I am consumed by inches. For you do not know--that night--that night in which I saw her so beautiful--that night is always present to my thoughts--that picture of voluptuousness is there, there--always there--before my eyes. Let them be open or shut, in feverish weakness or burning watchfulness, I see her black eyes and inflaming glances, which boil the marrow of my bones. I feel her breath upon my face--I hear her voice." "But these are frightful torments!" "Frightful! ay, frightful! But death! but annihilation! but to lose forever this remembrance, as vivid as reality; but to renounce these recollections, which torture me, devour me, and consume me! No! no! no! Live! live--poor, despised, scorned--live in the galleys, but live! so that thought remains--since this infernal creature has all my thought--is all my thought!"