An absurd idea took possession of him.  He remembered that during the Commune he was nearly killed in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise.  He thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him.  Then, as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized.  He saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants.  A catafalque contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling hand, to throw holy water on the cloth which covered the bier.  And a voice said within him: 

“You are dead, since Micheline is about to marry another.”

He made an effort to banish this importunate idea.  He could not succeed.  Thoughts flew through his brain with fearful rapidity.  He thought he was beginning to be seized with brain fever.  And this dismal ceremony kept coming before him with the same chants, the same words repeated, and the same faces appearing.  The houses seemed to fly before his vacant eyes.  To stop this nightmare he tried to count the gas-lamps:  one, two, three, four, five—­but the same thought interrupted his calculation: 

“You are dead, since your betrothed is about to marry another.”

He was afraid he was going mad.  A sharp pain shot across his forehead just above the right eyebrow.  In the old days he had felt the same pain when he had overworked himself in preparing for his examinations at the Polytechnic School.  With a bitter smile he asked himself if one of the aching vessels in his brain was about to burst?

The sudden stoppage of the cab freed him from this torture.  The hotel porter opened the door.  Pierre stepped out mechanically.  Without speaking a word he followed a waiter, who showed him to a room on the second floor.  Left alone, he sat down.  This room, with its commonplace furniture, chilled him.  He saw in it a type of his future life:  lonely and desolate.  Formerly, when he used to come to Paris, he stayed with Madame Desvarennes, where he had the comforts of home, and every one looked on him affectionately.

Here, at the hotel, orders were obeyed with politeness at so much a day.  Would it always be thus in future?

This painful impression dissipated his weakness as by enchantment.  He so bitterly regretted the sweets of the past, that he resolved to struggle to secure them for the future.  He dressed himself quickly, and removed all the traces of his journey; then, his mind made up, he jumped into a cab, and drove to Madame Desvarennes’s.  All indecision had left him.  His fears now seemed contemptible.  He must defend himself.  It was a question of his happiness.

At the Place de la Concorde a carriage passed his cab.  He recognized the livery of Madame Desvarennes’s coachman and leant forward.  The mistress did not see him.  He was about to stop the cab and tell his driver to follow her carriage when a sudden thought decided him to go on.  It was Micheline he wanted to see.  His future destiny depended on her.  Madame Desvarennes had made him clearly understand that by calling for his help in her fatal letter.  He went on his way, and in a few minutes arrived at the mansion in the Rue Saint-Dominique.