One might suppose that those destined to accomplish these butcheries of men would be despised!  No, they are loaded with honors.  They are clad in gold and in resplendent garments; they wear plumes on their heads and ornaments on their breasts, and they are given crosses, rewards, titles of every kind.  They are proud, respected, loved by women, cheered by the crowd, solely because their mission is to shed human blood; They drag through the streets their instruments of death, that the passer-by, clad in black, looks on with envy.  For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence!  There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing!

30th June.  To kill is the law, because nature loves eternal youth.  She seems to cry in all her unconscious acts:  “Quick! quick! quick!” The more she destroys, the more she renews herself.

2d July.  A human being—­what is a human being?  Through thought it is a reflection of all that is; through memory and science it is an abridged edition of the universe whose history it represents, a mirror of things and of nations, each human being becomes a microcosm in the macrocosm.

3d July.  It must be a pleasure, unique and full of zest, to kill; to have there before one the living, thinking being; to make therein a little hole, nothing but a little hole, to see that red thing flow which is the blood, which makes life; and to have before one only a heap of limp flesh, cold, inert, void of thought!

5th August.  I, who have passed my life in judging, condemning, killing by the spoken word, killing by the guillotine those who had killed by the knife, I, I, if I should do as all the assassins have done whom I have smitten, I—­I—­who would know it?

10th August.  Who would ever know?  Who would ever suspect me, me, me, especially if I should choose a being I had no interest in doing away with?

15th August.  The temptation has come to me.  It pervades my whole being; my hands tremble with the desire to kill.

22d August.  I could resist no longer.  I killed a little creature as an experiment, for a beginning.  Jean, my servant, had a goldfinch in a cage hung in the office window.  I sent him on an errand, and I took the little bird in my hand, in my hand where I felt its heart beat.  It was warm.  I went up to my room.  From time to time I squeezed it tighter; its heart beat faster; this was atrocious and delicious.  I was near choking it.  But I could not see the blood.

Then I took scissors, short-nail scissors, and I cut its throat with three slits, quite gently.  It opened its bill, it struggled to escape me, but I held it, oh!  I held it—­I could have held a mad dog—­and I saw the blood trickle.

And then I did as assassins do—­real ones.  I washed the scissors, I washed my hands.  I sprinkled water and took the body, the corpse, to the garden to hide it.  I buried it under a strawberry-plant.  It will never be found.  Every day I shall eat a strawberry from that plant.  How one can enjoy life when one knows how!