has descended upon me. . . . I feel the heavy rocks
on which my neck has crashed, against which my flesh
has been bruised. . . . Why, with all the black despair in which I find myself, do these high walls rise
up towards heaven? Why these dismal birds flying
about in unexpected sunshine? . . . Why is this thing
crouched down beside me crying? . . . Why? . . .
I don't know. . . .
I am going to kill her. . . . She is in her bedroom without lights, in bed. . . . I am in the dressing room pacing up and down. . . I am walking back and forth with constrained breath, my head on fire, with clinched fists eager to inflict punishment. . . . I am going to kill her! . . . From time to time I stop near the door and listen. . . . She is crying. . . . And in a minute I will enter. . . . I will enter and pull her off the bed, drag her by the hair, knock her senseless, break her neck against the marble edges of the fireplace. . . . I want the room to be red with her blood. . . . I want to see her body beaten into lumps of battered flesh which I shall throw out with the rest of the rubbish and which the garbage man will take away tomorrow. . . . Cry, cry! . . . In a minute you'll howl, my dearest! . . . Haven't I been stupid! . . . To think of everything but that! . . . To fear everything except that! . . . To say to myself: "she will leave me" and never, never: "she will deceive me. . . ." To have failed to divine the nature of this den, this old man. all this filth! . . . Really I had never thought of it before, blind fool that I was. She must have laughed when I implored her not to leave me! . . . To leave me. . . . Ah! yes, to leave me! . . . She did not want to, of course. . . . Now I understand it. . . . I inspired her neither with probity of heart nor with decency of conduct; I was to her just a label, a trade mark. . . a mark of superior value! . . . Yes, when they saw
