He left me after these expressions of hate without any attempt on my part to detain or calm him. I felt crushed by an enormous weight of sorrow. I have never in my sentimental life known that jealousy which most books describe, that agonizing, feverish uneasiness about a perfidy which one suspects without being certain. I have never loved without confidence. It seems to me that women ought to be scrupulous of deceiving men who love them in that fashion. I have discovered that it is not so. Should I commence to, for again I should comfort myself in the same way love the simple reason that a person cannot see with his eyes full of tears. In return, if I have never been jealous in that uneasy and suspicious fashion, I have experienced that other sorrow which consists of having in one’s heart something like a perpetually bleeding open wound, the evidence of having been deceived. I have known what it is to suffer for entire nights at the idea of a woman’s body being given up as a prey to another man’s luxury. This horrible oppression, this interruption of the inmost soul, this deadly shudder in the face of certainty, is, I believe, the worst form of sentimental disorder, and this suffering I have just experienced again with some intensity in reading the name of Tournade in the address book! Oh, God! how miserable I was when I got back to my residence on the Boulevard des Invalides after walking all the way to quiet my nerves! It was in vain that I told Molan that I was not sure Camille was the mistress of the cad whose impure face had been so repulsive to me in her dressing-room at the Vaudeville, for there was no room in me for doubt on the subject. It was so simple. The unhappy child had lost her head. Excess of anger and sorrow had deranged her, and in a moment of delirium she had executed that scheme of revenge which would degrade her for ever. What am I saying? She had executed the plan! She was doing so even at the moment on that night when I saw the stars shining above my head between the walls of the houses. That hour, these minutes, those seconds, whose length I felt, and whose flight I measured, she also lived and employed. How? The sensations with which this idea blasted me must be, I should think, those of the man condemned to death and of his friends who love him during the time which separates his awakening on his last morning and his execution. He feels a desire to arrest the passage of time, to even throw the world, and for the earth to open, houses to fall, and a miracle to be accomplished. With what anxiety he then feels that life performs its functions in us with the implacable accuracy of a machine! All our moral and physical agonies, our revolts and surrenders, have no more influence upon nature than the flutterings of an insect in the furnace of a locomotive. “It is over! She is Tournade’s mistress!”