the vitiated air; but I could not drive it from my brain, not even for a second.  I do not know how to express this torture.  It gnawed at my soul, and I felt a frightful pain, a real physical and moral pain.

   My life was ruined!  How could I escape from this situation?  How
   could I draw back, and how could I confess?

   And I loved the one who was to become your mother with a mad
   passion, which this insurmountable obstacle only aggravated.

   A terrible rage was taking possession of me, choking me, a rage that
   verged on madness!  Surely I was crazy that evening!

   The child was sleeping.  I got up and looked at it as it slept.  It
   was he, this abortion, this spawn, this nothing, that condemned me
   to irremediable unhappiness!

   He was asleep, his mouth open, wrapped in his bed-clothes in a crib
   beside my bed, where I could not sleep.

How did I ever do what I did?  How do I know?  What force urged me on?  What malevolent power took possession of me?  Oh! the temptation to crime came to me without any forewarning.  All I recall is that my heart beat tumultuously.  It beat so hard that I could hear it, as one hears the strokes of a hammer behind a partition.  That is all I can recall—­the beating of my heart!  In my head there was a strange confusion, a tumult, a senseless disorder, a lack of presence of mind.  It was one of those hours of bewilderment and hallucination when a man is neither conscious of his actions nor able to guide his will.

   I gently raised the coverings from the body of the child; I turned
   them down to the foot of the crib, and he lay there uncovered and
   naked.

   He did not wake.  Then I went toward the window, softly, quite
   softly, and I opened it.

A breath of icy air glided in like an assassin; it was so cold that I drew aside, and the two candles flickered.  I remained standing near the window, not daring to turn round, as if for fear of seeing what was doing on behind me, and feeling the icy air continually across my forehead, my cheeks, my hands, the deadly air which kept streaming in.  I stood there a long time.

I was not thinking, I was not reflecting.  All at once a little cough caused me to shudder frightfully from head to foot, a shudder that I feel still to the roots of my hair.  And with a frantic movement I abruptly closed both sides of the window and, turning round, ran over to the crib.

   He was still asleep, his mouth open, quite naked.  I touched his
   legs; they were icy cold and I covered them up.