On that night General D’Hubert, either stretched on his back with his hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions.  Nauseating disgust at the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments—­for what the devil did he want to go to Fouche for?—­he knew them all in turn.  “I am an idiot, neither more nor less,” he thought.  “A sensitive idiot.  Because I overheard two men talk in a cafe...  I am an idiot afraid of lies—­whereas in life it is only truth that matters.”

Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark.  And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too.  She would marry somebody else.  His very soul writhed.  The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless fatality.  General D’Hubert trembled as he put down the empty water ewer.  “He will have me,” he thought.  General D’Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give.  He had in his dry mouth the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a young girl’s candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the honourable man’s fear of cowardice.

But if true courage consists in going out to meet an odious danger from which our body, soul and heart recoil together General D’Hubert had the opportunity to practise it for the first time in his life.  He had charged exultingly at batteries and infantry squares and ridden with messages through a hail of bullets without thinking anything about it.  His business now was to sneak out unheard, at break of day, to an obscure and revolting death.  General D’Hubert never hesitated.  He carried two pistols in a leather bag which he slung over his shoulder.  Before he had crossed the garden his mouth was dry again.  He picked two oranges.  It was only after shutting the gate after him that he felt a slight faintness.

He stepped out disregarding it, and after going a few yards regained the command of his legs.  He sucked an orange as he walked.  It was a colourless and pellucid dawn.  The wood of pines detached its columns of brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks of the gray hillside behind.  He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily.  That temperamental, good-humoured coolness in the face of danger, which made him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors, was gradually asserting itself.  It was like going into battle.  Arriving at the edge of the wood he sat down on a boulder, holding the other orange in his hand, and thought that he had come ridiculously early on the ground.  Before very long, however, he heard the swishing of bushes, footsteps on the hard ground, and the sounds of a disjointed loud conversation.  A voice somewhere behind him said boastfully, “He’s game for my bag.”