The wretched man continued his headlong course along the deserted quays.  He went with his head bare, his eyes haggard.  To breathe more freely, he had torn off his cravat and thrown it to the winds.

Sometimes, unconsciously, he crossed the path of a solitary wayfarer, who would pause, touched with pity, and turn to watch the retreating figure of the unfortunate wretch he thought deprived of reason.  In a by-road, near Grenelle, some police officers stopped him, and tried to question him.  He mechanically tendered them his card.  They read it, and permitted him to pass, convinced that he was drunk.

Anger,—­a furious anger, began to replace his first feeling of resignation.  In his heart arose a hate, stronger and more violent than even his love for Claire.  That other, that preferred one, that haughty viscount, who could not overcome those paltry obstacles, oh, that he had him there, under his knee!

At that moment, this noble and proud man, this severe and grave magistrate experienced an irresistible longing for vengeance.  He began to understand the hate that arms itself with a knife, and lays in ambush in out-of-the-way places; which strikes in the dark, whether in front or from behind matters little, but which strikes, which kills, whose vengeance blood alone can satisfy.

At that very hour he was supposed to be occupied with an inquiry into the case of an unfortunate, accused of having stabbed one of her wretched companions.  She was jealous of the woman, who had tried to take her lover from her.  He was a soldier, coarse in manners, and always drunk.

M. Daburon felt himself seized with pity for this miserable creature, whom he had commenced to examine the day before.  She was very ugly, in fact truly repulsive; but the expression of the eyes, when speaking of her soldier, returned to the magistrate’s memory.

“She loves him sincerely,” thought he.  “If each one of the jurors had suffered what I am suffering now, she would be acquitted.  But how many men in this world have loved passionately?  Perhaps not one in twenty.”

He resolved to recommend this girl to the indulgence of the tribunal, and to extenuate as much as possible her guilt.

For he himself had just determined upon the commission of a crime.  He was resolved to kill Albert de Commarin.

During the rest of the night he became all the more determined in this resolution, demonstrating to himself by a thousand mad reasons, which he found solid and inscrutable, the necessity for and the justifiableness of this vengeance.

At seven o’clock in the morning, he found himself in an avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, not far from the lake.  He made at once for the Porte Maillot, procured a cab, and was driven to his house.

The delirium of the night continued, but without suffering.  He was conscious of no fatigue.  Calm and cool, he acted under the power of an hallucination, almost like a somnambulist.