He saw again in continual hallucinations, sometimes the lascivious player as she had appeared to him near her little white bed, sometimes the fresh face of the religious school-girl who smiled to him from the height of the gallery.  At other times he saw them both together, and each of them called him and said to him:  Come, come.

Oh! why all these obstacles, these doors, these walls, these prejudices and that formidable barrier which he dared not pass, duty.

It seemed to him that a burning lava was escaping from his heart, running into his veins and devouring him.  His limbs were heavy and bruised; his head was on fire like his heart, and his thoughts were enveloped in mire.  Often with his eye fixed on space, he contemplated some phantom visible to himself alone; then big tears rolled slowly on his cheeks and fell one by one on his bare chest, and he felt that they relieved him.

He had placed a statue of the Virgin at the foot of his bed:  the one which has a heart in flames and open arms.  He looked on it as he went to sleep and prayed the Mother, eternally chaste, to watch over his dreams.

But many times in his delirium he saw the Virgin come to life and take the well-known face of her from whom he sought to flee, and come and find him in his couch.  And he woke with a start full of terror of himself at the moment when, in his impious sacrilege, he felt the chaste bosom of the Mother of God quiver beneath his kisses.

Then he opened his scared eyes and perceived before him the sweet form which stretched its plaster arms to him in the shadow, and full of agony he cried: 

“Mater inviolata, ora pro nobis!”

But once he thought he heard a voice which answered: 

“Christe, audi nos.”

XXXII.

THE DEATH’S-HEAD.

  “God is my witness that I did then
  everything in the world to divert myself
  and to heal myself.”

  A. DE MUSSET (Confession d’un enfant du Siecle).

One night he went out by stealth, crossed the market-place, and descended the hill.  He had the look of a man who was hiding himself, and he went back several times, as if he was afraid of being followed.  He reached the cemetery, took a key from his pocket, cautiously opened the gate and closed it behind him.  At the bottom of the principal path there was a little chapel which served for an ossuary.  In it was a hideous accumulation of the remains of several generations.  The cemetery was becoming too full and it had been necessary to make room.  Here as elsewhere the cry was:  “Room for the young.”  And it is only justice.  What would become of as if all the old remained?  There is overcrowding under ground as there is above.  “Keep off!  Keep off!” Therefore their ancestors’ bones were in the way, and they had cast them into this retreat to wait for the common grave.  But the common grave is again a place which must be taken, and the recent gluttonous dead want everything.  “Keep off!  Keep off!” Let us not say anything ourselves, perhaps they will dispute with us the corner of ground which should shelter our bones!