“But all my reasoning failed to reassure me. I was jealous. My suspicions tormented me, torturing and preying upon my mind. As yet it was not a suspicion but simply suspicion. I endured misery and frightful anguish. An obscure thought possessed me—a thought covered with a veil—and a veil I dared not raise, for beneath it lay a terrible doubt. … A lover! … Had she a lover? … Think of it! think of it! It was unlikely, impossible … and yet? …
“Montina’s face was always before my eyes. I saw the tall, insipid beauty, with shiny hair, smiling into her face, and I said to myself: ‘It is he.’ I made up a story of their intrigue. They had been talking of a book, discussing some amorous adventure, finding an incident similar to their own, and from this had followed the rest. I kept a lookout, a prey to the most abominable torture that man can endure. I bought shoes with rubber soles so that I could move about silently and I spent my life going up and down the little winding staircase so as to catch them. Often I crept down the stairs on my hands, head first, to see what they were doing. Then I had to go up again backwards, with great difficulty, after finding that the clerk was always there with them. I lived in a state of continual suffering. I could think of nothing, I could not work, nor could I look after the business. As soon as I had left the house, as soon as I had walked a hundred yards along the street, said to myself: ‘He is there,’ and back I went. He was not, so I went out again! But I had hardly left the house when I thought: ‘He has come now,’ and returned again.
“This went on every day.
“The night was worse still, for I felt her by my side, in my bed. There she was asleep or pretending to be asleep! Was she asleep? Of course not. Then that was another lie?
“I lay motionless on my back, on fire from the warmth of her body, panting and in agony. I was filled with a vile but steady desire to get up, take a candle and hammer and with a single stroke split her head open to see what was inside! I knew that I would find nothing but a nasty mess of brains and blood, nothing else. I would have learnt nothing. Impossible to find anything out! And her eyes! When she looked at me, I was seized with a wild fit of fury. You may look at her—she looks back at you! Her eyes are clear, candid—and false, false, false! and no one can guess what lies behind them. I longed to stick needles into them, to burst open the mirrors of deceit.
“How well I understand the Inquisition! I could have twisted her wrists in the iron bracelets.—Speak. … Confess! … You won’t? Just wait! … I could have strangled her by degrees. … Speak, confess! … You won’t? … And I would have squeezed, squeezed, until her throat began to rattle, until she choked to death. … Or else I would have burned her fingers over the fire. … Oh! that I would have done with great pleasure! … Speak … speak then. … You won’t? I would have held them on the red-hot coal, they would have been roasted at the tips … then she would have spoken … surely! … she would have spoken. …”
Trémoulin, standing erect with clenched fists, shouted his story. On the neighbouring roofs, around us, the ghostly shadows awoke and sat up, they listened, disturbed in their sleep. As for me, I was deeply moved, and completely gripped by the tale I was listening to.
In the darkness I saw before me the little woman, the little, fair, vivacious, artful woman, as if I had known her. I saw her selling her books, talking to the men who found her childlike manner disturbing, and in her delicate doll-like head I could see petty crafty ideas, stupid exaggerated ideas, the dreams of musk-scented milliners attracted by the heroes of romantic novels. I suspected her just as he did. I hated and detested her, and would also willingly have burned her fingers to make her confess.
He continued more calmly: “I don’t know why I am telling you all this. I have never yet spoken about it. Never, but I have seen nobody for two years. I have not talked to a single person, and the whole thing was seething within me like fermenting wine. I am emptying my heart of its pain, unluckily
