Laurent, instead of understanding her feeling, became still more satirical. He wrote under his own figure: _Lost in the forest and in his mistress's heart_; and under Thérèse's: _Her heart is as sadly rent as her gown_. The picture was entitled: _Honeymoon in a Cemetery_. Thérèse forced herself to smile; she praised the drawing, which, despite its buffoonery, revealed the hand of the master, and she made no reflection on the unfortunate choice of a subject. She made a mistake: she would have done better to demand at the outset that Laurent should not let his hilarity run about at random in long boots. She allowed him to tread on her toes because she was still afraid that he might be ill and might be seized with delirium in the midst of his dismal jesting. Two or three other incidents of this nature having put her on her guard, she began to wonder whether the unexciting, regular life which she sought to give her friend was the regimen best adapted to that exceptional nature. She had said to him: "Perhaps you will be bored sometimes; but ennui is a welcome rest from vertigo, and when your mental health has fully returned, you will be amused by trifles and will know what real cheerfulness is." But matters turned out differently. Laurent did not admit his ennui, but it was impossible for him to endure it, and he vented it in strange and bitter caprices. He lived a life of constant ups and downs. Abrupt transitions from reverie to wild excitement, and from absolute indifference to noisy extravagance, became with him a normal condition, and he could not live without them. The happiness that he had found so delicious for a few days, began to irritate him like the sight of the sea during a flat calm. "You are lucky," he said to Thérèse, "to wake every morning with your heart in the same place. You see, I lose mine while I am asleep. It is like the night-cap my nurse used to put on my head when I was a baby; sometimes she found it at my feet and sometimes on the floor." Thérèse said to herself that it was impossible that serenity could come to that troubled soul all at once, and that it must become accustomed to it by degrees. To that end, he must not be prevented from returning sometimes to active life; but how could she arrange it so that activity would not be a blemish, a deadly blow dealt at their ideal? Thérèse could not be jealous of the mistresses Laurent had had previously; but she could not understand how she could kiss his brow on the morrow of a debauch. She must, therefore, since the work, which he had resumed with great ardor, excited him instead of calming him, seek with him a vent for that surplus energy. The natural vent would have been the enthusiasm of love; but that was an additional source of excitement, after which Laurent would fain have scaled the third heaven; lacking the strength for that, he turned his eyes in the direction of hell, and his brain, sometimes his very face, received a diabolical reflection therefrom.