"I have just given him an injection of morphine, to subdue him," he said. "He will doze now, till the end. But such a paroxysm! That of last night was a mere outline.--Above all things pay no attention to what he may have said to you. It was absolute mental confusion,--madness." He repeated: "madness." He looked his companion squarely in the face--too squarely--as he emitted that phrase which contradicted so utterly his earlier formulas: "He lives over past events.--The depths of his memory come to the surface." He himself realized, no doubt, the terrible bearing of the antithesis between this second assertion and the former one, for he could not help blushing. What words had Jaubourg uttered, then, in his delirium, that were even more explicit? Had he pronounced, before those witnesses, the horrifying sentence: "I was Madame de Claviers' lover, and Landri is my son?" At all events, that was the ghastly fact that Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run through his whole body. When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds, of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he has just learned. He does not realize it. Nor is it hesitation. Later he will be able to argue, he will attempt, rather, to argue, against the evidence. For the moment the fact has entered into him, with its irresistible force, as a steel point enters the flesh that it passes through, and there ensues, in the most secret depths of his being, that total upheaval of nature to which the hymn in the liturgy refers: _Stupebit et natura_. However, life goes on about this man who has been stricken to death and knows it not. It even goes on within him, and he seconds it, and he obeys its behests with an automatism resembling that of an evil suggestion. In this state Landri descended the stairs from Jaubourg's apartment, re-entered the cab he had left at the door, and gave the cabman Maître Métivier's address, almost without being conscious of it. The clock, wound before the terrible shock, performed its functions mechanically.