short. He clutched my wrists with his little hands, and his body writhed like a feather in the fire. Then he moved no more.
My heart thudded, ah! the bird’s heart! I flung the body in a ditch, then grasses over him.
I went home again; I dined well. What an utterly simple affair!
That evening I was very gay, lighthearted, young again. I spent the rest of the evening at the Prefect’s house. They found me good company.
But I have not seen blood. I am calm.
Aug. 30th. The corpse has been found. They are searching for the murderer. Ah! Ah!
Sept. 1st. They have arrested two tramps. Proofs are lacking.
Sept. 2nd. The parents have been to see me. They wept. Ah! Ah!
Oct. 6th. They have discovered nothing. Some wandering vagabond must have struck the blow. Ah! Ah! If I had only seen the blood flow, I think I should now be quiet in my mind.
Oct. 10th. The lust to kill possesses my every nerve. It is like the furious passions of love that torture us at twenty.
Oct. 20th. Yet another. I was walking along the river, after breakfast. And I saw, under a willow, a fisherman fast asleep. It was high noon. A spade was stuck, it might have been for the purpose, in a nearby field of potatoes.
I took it, I came back; I lifted it like a club and, cutting through it with a single blow, I split the fisherman’s head right open. Oh, how he bled! Crimson blood, full of brains. It trickled into the water, very gently. And I went on my way at a solemn pace. If anyone had seen me! Ah! Ah! I should have made an excellent assassin.
Oct. 25th. The affair of the fisherman has roused a great outcry. His nephew, who used to fish with him, has been accused of the murder.
Oct. 26th. The examining magistrate declares that the nephew is guilty. Everyone in the town believes it. Ah! Ah!
Oct. 27th. The nephew has put up a poor defence. He declares that he had gone to the village to buy bread and cheese. He swears that his uncle was killed in his absence. Who believes him?
Oct. 28th. The nephew is as good as condemned, so utterly have they made him lose his head. Ah! Ah! Justice!
Nov. 15th. Crushing evidence accumulates against the nephew, who will inherit from his uncle. I shall preside at the assizes.
Jan. 25th. To death! To death! To death! I have condemned him to death. Ah! Ah! The solicitor-general spoke like an angel. Ah! Ah! Yet another. I shall go to see him executed.
March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man’s head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!
Now I shall wait, I can afford to wait. So little a thing might trip me up.
The manuscript contained several more papers, but without relating any fresh crime.
The alienists, to whom it was entrusted, declare that there exist in the world many undetected madmen, as cunning and as redoubtable as this monstrous maniac.
Indiscretion
Before marriage, they had loved each other with a pure love, their heads in the stars.
It had begun in a pleasant acquaintance made on a sea front. He had found her entirely charming, this young girl, like a rose, with her transparent sunshades and her pretty gowns, drifting past the vast background of the sea. He had loved her, fair and delicately slender, in her frame of blue waves and illimitable sky. And he confounded the compassionate tenderness roused in him by this virginal child, with the vague powerful emotion stirred in his soul, his heart, his very veins by the sharp salt air and the wide countryside filled with sun and sea.
The girl herself had loved him, because he wooed her, because he was young, rich enough, well-bred and fastidious. She had loved him because it is natural for young girls to love young men who speak to them of love.
Then for three months they had spent their time together, eyes looking into eyes and hand touching hand. The mutual happiness that they felt—in the morning before the bath, in the freshness of a new day, and their farewells at night, in the shore, under the stars, in the soft warm of the quiet night, farewells murmured softly, very softly—had already the character of kisses, though their lips had never met.
They dreamed of one another in the instant of sleep, thought of one another in the instant of waking, and, without a word exchanged, called to each other, and desired each other with all the force of their souls and all the force of their bodies.
After their marriage, their adoration had come to earth. It had been at first a kind of sensuous and insatiable fury of possession, then an exalted affection wrought of flesh and blood romance, of caresses already a little sophisticated, of ingenious and delicately indelicate lovemaking. Their every glance had a lascivious significance, all their gestures roused in them thoughts of the ardent intimacy of their nights.
Now, without acknowledging it, perhaps without yet realising it, they had begun to weary of one another. They loved each other dearly, still; but there were no longer any revelations to share, nothing to do that they had not done many times, nothing to discover about one another, not even a new word of love, an unpremeditated ecstasy, an intonation that might make more poignant the familiar words, so often repeated.
None the
