My heart was suddenly touched, grieved, filled with pity, tenderness, love for this poor innocent being that I had wished to kill.  I kissed his fine, soft hair long and tenderly; then I went and sat down before the fire.

I reflected with amazement with horror on what I had done, asking myself whence come those tempests of the soul in which a man loses all perspective of things, all command over himself and acts as in a condition of mad intoxication, not knowing whither he is going—­like a vessel in a hurricane.

   The child coughed again, and it gave my heart a wrench.  Suppose it
   should die!  O God!  O God!  What would become of me?

I rose from my chair to go and look at him, and with a candle in my hand I leaned over him.  Seeing him breathing quietly I felt reassured, when he coughed a third time.  It gave me such a shock tat I started backward, just as one does at sight of something horrible, and let my candle fall.

As I stood erect after picking it up, I noticed that my temples were bathed in perspiration, that cold sweat which is the result of anguish of soul.  And I remained until daylight bending over my son, becoming calm when he remained quiet for some time, and filled with atrocious pain when a weak cough came from his mouth.

   He awoke with his eyes red, his throat choked, and with an air of
   suffering.

   When the woman came in to arrange my room I sent her at once for a
   doctor.  He came at the end of an hour, and said, after examining
   the child: 

   “Did he not catch cold?”

   I began to tremble like a person with palsy, and I faltered: 

   “No, I do not think so.”

   And then I said: 

   “What is the matter?  Is it serious?”

   “I do not know yet,” he replied.  “I will come again this evening.”

   He came that evening.  My son had remained almost all day in a
   condition of drowsiness, coughing from time to time.  During the
   night inflammation of the lungs set in.

   That lasted ten days.  I cannot express what I suffered in those
   interminable hours that divide morning from night, right from
   morning.

   He died.

And since—­since that moment, I have not passed one hour, not a single hour, without the frightful burning recollection, a gnawing recollection, a memory that seems to wring my heart, awaking in me like a savage beast imprisoned in the depth of my soul.

   Oh! if I could have gone mad!

M. Poirel de la Voulte raised his spectacles with a motion that was peculiar to him whenever he finished reading a contract; and the three heirs of the defunct looked at one another without speaking, pale and motionless.

At the end of a minute the lawyer resumed: 

“That must be destroyed.”