‘This is more than I can bear,’ muttered the poor man as he fled away, away from the lashing fury. And as he felt his way along the walls, and passed through the passage, down the stairs, across the echoing court, he muttered almost in tears, ‘More than I can bear, more than I can bear.’ Whither is he going? Straight before him, as if in a dream. He crosses the square and is half over the bridge, before the fresh air revives him. He sits down on a bench, takes off his hat and pulls up his coat sleeves to still the beating of his pulses; and the regular lapping of the water makes him calmer. He comes to himself again, but consciousness brings only memory and pain. What a woman! what a monster! And to think that he has lived five-and-thirty years with her and not known her! A shudder of disgust runs over him at the recollection of all the horrors he has just heard. She has spared nothing and left within him nothing alive, not even the pride which still kept him erect, his faith in his work and his belief in the Académie. At the thought of the Académie he instinctively turned round. Beyond the deserted bridge, beyond the wider avenue which leads to the foot of the building, the pile of the Palais Mazarin, massed together in the darkness, up-reared its portico and its dome, as on the cover of the Didot books, so often gazed upon in his young days and in the ambitious aspirations of his whole life. That dome, that block of stone, had been the delusive object of his hopes, and the cause of all his misery. It was there he sought his wife, feeling neither love nor delight, but for the hope of the Institute. And he has had the coveted seat, and he knows the price! Just then there was a sound of steps and laughter on the bridge; it came nearer. Some students with their mistresses were coming back to their rooms. Afraid of being recognised, he rose and leant over the parapet; and while the party passed close to him without seeing him, he reflected with bitterness that he had never amused himself, never allowed himself such a fine night’s holiday of song beneath the starlight. His ambition had always been fixed unbendingly on the approach to yonder dome, the dome, as it were, of a temple, whose beliefs and whose ritual he had respected in anticipation.