“These three, then,” said Thibault, who was beginning to feel the effects of the wine he had drunk, “are fit for nothing more than to be thrown out of window? To the devil with you!” he exclaimed as he took up one of them and sent it flying. As the glass went through the air it left a track of light behind it, which blazed and went out like a flash of lightning. Thibault took up the two remaining glasses and threw them in turn, and each time the same thing happened, but the third flash was followed by a loud peal of thunder. Thibault shut the window, and was thinking, as he turned to his seat again, how he should explain this strange occurrence to his companions; but his two companions had disappeared. “Cowards!” he muttered. Then he looked for a glass, but found none left. “Hum! that’s awkward,” he said. “I must drink out of the bottle, that’s all!” And suiting the action to the word, Thibault finished up his dinner by draining the bottle, which did not help to steady his brain, already somewhat shaky. At nine o’clock, Thibault called the innkeeper, paid his account, and departed. He was in an angry disposition of enmity against all the world; the thoughts from which he had hoped to escape possessed him more and more. Agnelette was being taken farther and farther from him as the time went by; everyone, wife or mistress, had someone to love them. This day which had been one of hatred and despair to him, had been one full of the promise of joy and happiness for everybody else; the lord of Vauparfond, the two wretched valets, François and Champagne, each of them had a bright star of hope to follow; while he, he alone, went stumbling along in the darkness. Decidedly there was a curse upon him. “But,” he went on thinking to himself, “if so, the pleasures of the damned belong to me, and I have a right to claim them.” As these thoughts went surging through his brain, as he walked along cursing aloud, shaking his fist at the sky, he was on the way to his hut and had nearly reached it, when he heard a horse coming up behind him at a gallop. “Ah!” said Thibault, “here comes the Lord of Vauparfond, hastening to the meeting with his love. I should laugh, my fine Sir Raoul, if my Lord of Mont-Gobert managed just to catch you! You would not get off quite so easily as if it were Maître Magloire; there would be swords out, and blows given and received!” Thus engaged in thinking what would happen if the Comte de Mont-Gobert were to surprise his rival, Thibault, who was walking in the road, evidently did not get out of the way quickly enough, for the horseman, seeing a peasant of some kind barring his passage, brought his whip down upon him in a violent blow, calling out at the same time: “Get out of the way, you beggar, if you don’t wish to be trampled under the horse’s feet!”