He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April.
He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly.
He walked like a little child who is permitted to toddle alone.
At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover the mastery of his mind.
He tried to put to himself, for the last time, and definitely, the problem over which he had, in a manner, fallen prostrate with fatigue:
Ought he to denounce himself?
Ought he to hold his peace?
He could not manage to see anything distinctly.
The vague aspects of all the courses of reasoning which had been sketched out by his meditations quivered and vanished, one after the other, into smoke.
He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind, something in him must die, and that of necessity, and without his being able to escape the fact; that he was entering a sepulchre on the right hand as much as on the left; that he was passing through a death agony,-- the agony of his happiness, or the agony of his virtue.
Alas! all his resolution had again taken possession of him. He was no further advanced than at the beginning.
Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive-trees quivered in the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all studded with stars.
BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
CHAPTER IV
FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP
Three o'clock in the morning had just struck, and he had been walking thus for five hours, almost uninterruptedly, when he at length allowed himself to drop into his chair.
There he fell asleep and had a dream.
This dream, like the majority of dreams, bore no relation to the situation, except by its painful and heart-rending character, but it made an impression on him.