He had nothing to be afraid of. I remained impassive under the storm of abuse. The only things that had roused me were his accusation against Bérangère and his blunt declaration of her love for the man Velmot. But I had long since resolved not to take my feelings for her into account, to ignore them entirely, not even to defend her or condemn her or judge her and to refuse to accept my suffering until events had afforded me undeniable proofs. I knew her to be guilty of acts which I did not know of. Was I therefore to believe her guilty of those of which she was accused? At heart, the feeling that seemed to persist was a profound pity. The horrible tragedy in which Bérangère was submerged was increasing in violence. Théodore Massignac and his accomplice were now antagonists. Once again Noël Dorgeroux's secret was about to cause an outburst of passion; and everything seemed to foretell that Bérangère would be swept away in the storm. What I read in the newspapers confirmed what Massignac had told me. The articles lie before me as I write. They all express the same, more or less pugnacious, enthusiasm; and none of them gives a forecast of the truth which nevertheless was on the point of being discovered. While the ignorant and superficial journalists go wildly to work, heaping up the most preposterous suppositions, the really cultivated writers maintain a great reserve and appear to be mainly concerned in resisting any idea of a miracle to which a section of the public might be inclined to give ear: "There is no miracle about it!" they exclaim. "We are in the presence of a scientific riddle which will be solved by purely scientific means. In the meantime let us confess our total incompetence." In any case, the comments of the press could not fail to increase the public excitement to the highest degree. At six o'clock in the evening the amphitheatre was taken by assault. The wholly inadequate staff vainly attempted to stop the invasion of the crowd. Numbers of seats were occupied by main force by people who had no right to be there; and the performance began in tumult and confusion, amid the hostile clamour and mad applause that greeted the man Massignac when he passed through the bars of his cage. True, the crowd lapsed into silence as soon as the Three Eyes appeared, but it remained nervous and irritable; and the spectacle that followed was not one to alleviate those symptoms. It was a strange spectacle, the most difficult to understand of all those which I saw. In the case of the others, those which preceded and those which followed, the mystery lay solely in the fact of their presentment. We beheld normal, natural scenes. But this one showed us _things that are contrary to the things that are_, things that might happen in the nightmare of a madman or in the hallucinations of a man dying in delirium.