Robespierre had now closed his eyes, overcome with fatigue, and still continued the thread of his thoughts and fancies. His ideas were becoming confused. He was vaguely wondering whether such imaginings were due to fever after all? If this was not the case, it was perhaps his conscience that awakened from its torpor, and rose at night to confront him with his victims? Yes, his conscience that relentlessly gnawed at his heart-strings, and wrung from him a gasping confession of alarm! Had not Fouquier-Tinville seen the Seine one night from his terrace rolling waves of blood? This was also a mere delusion ... the outcome of remorse, perhaps? Remorse? Why? Remorse for a just deed, for a work of redemption? No! It sprung rather from a diseased imagination caused by an over-excited and over-active brain, which, weakened by excess, clothed the simplest objects with supernatural attributes. Robespierre's eyes were now half-closed, and wandered dreamily to the women's courtyard, where grey arches stood out in clear and sharp relief under the soft moonlight. He was in deep reverie, wondering what could be the true cause of such strange illusions, and as he wondered, examples from past history came crowding to his mind. Yes ... did not Brutus imagine that he saw the shade of Cæsar gliding into his tent, when it could have been nothing but the flicker of a lamp on the curtains moved by the wind, or a moonbeam playing, as that one yonder, on a pillar? As he gazed his eyes dilated in horror. It was no moonbeam. The outlines of a woman's form, ethereal and transparent, stood motionless against the pillar. It moved! Another form, white and shadowy, glided towards the first, and a third emerged from the dim background and joined them. Robespierre followed every movement with horror-stricken gaze. He rose, crept nearer: was he awake, or was it indeed a dream? Had he again fallen a prey to delusions at the very moment when he was persuading himself of their unreality? He was not asleep! He was wide awake! He felt the hot blood coursing through his veins, he walked to and fro, and was completely self-possessed! He knew he was at the Conciergerie, and had come to fetch his son Olivier. A little while ago he had conversed with two men there, on that very spot, the turnkey and the night watchman. And yet his nervous imagination conjured up before his eyes those chimerical visions clothed with the semblance of reality! For, of course, he was not deceived, he knew well enough they were unreal delusions, and yet he felt nervous and ill at ease! "What strange beings we are!" he thought. "Poor human nature! We pride ourselves on our strength of mind, and yet we are subject to such hallucinations!"