Then, with the brutality of your kind-hearted man, who, condemned to kill an animal, and loathing the business, strikes fiercely and blindly, causing more destruction than necessary, I seized a heavy bronze bar from the fireplace and attacked the window. The blows echoed from the roof--smash! smash!--and the chattering of falling glass came from the garden-walk outside; the leadwork which had held the glass fragments together bulged out, and had to be broken out by incessant blows, which brought down shower after shower of glass fragments from that part of the window which lay above the line of my attack; and lo! when I had once entered on the business, all remorse fled, and a fury for destruction rose in my heart that I had never felt before, nor had I even suspected my own capacity for the feeling. So, perhaps, Philippe de Saluce felt when he destroyed his lover in a sudden accession of fury. I do not know, but I know that from behind some veil in my mind a new man stepped out, as Monsieur Hyde stepped from the soul of Monsieur Jekyll, and that I smashed and smashed for the pure pleasure, and from the vicious lust of destruction. Condemned to act by Fate, I revenged myself after the fashion of a tiger. Then, tearing a brocaded curtain down from its attachments, I spread it over the glass-splintered edge of the sill, crawled over it, lowered myself, dropped, and was free. As I stood on the garden-path, looking up at the ruin I had accomplished, I heard footsteps. The workmen were returning. "Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur!" cried the chief ouvrier, "we had forgotten you. Not till five minutes ago did Jacques remember that monsieur had not left the house when we bolted the door and came away; so we returned, running all the way from Etiolles." So my destruction of the window had been in vain, it would seem! Not so; for, just as at a first debauch the demon of drunkenness enters a man's heart, so at this orgie of destruction did the demon of destruction enter mine. "Joubert," said I that night, as I went to bed, "you have everything ready for to-morrow?" "All is ready," replied Joubert. "You will call me at half-past five." "Yes, monsieur. And your promise?" "My promise?" "To tell me with whom you are going to fight?" "Ah, yes! Well, I have two affairs on to-morrow morning. I am going to scratch Baron Carl von Lichtenberg on the arm, and I am going to drive my sword through M. de Coigny's heart." "Von Lichtenberg!" cried Joubert. "You are going to fight with a Lichtenberg, one of that accursed lot!" "I am going to fight with M. de Coigny. We have been enemies for years; he has mixed himself in this affair; he has offered himself up as a sacrifice----" "Mon Dieu!" cried the old fellow, drawing back, "is it you that are speaking, or the devil?" I was sitting up in bed; and in a mirror across the room I saw the wan reflection of my own face, and started at the expression of wrath and black hatred portrayed there.