M. Bergeret’s first impulse at this shameful sight was to act violently, like a plain man, even with the ferocity of an animal. Born as he was of a long line of unknown ancestors, amongst whom there were, of course, many cruel and savage souls, heir as he was of those innumerable generations of men, apes, and savage beasts from whom we are all descended, the professor had been endowed, along with the germ of life, with the destructive instinct of the older races. Under this shock these instincts awoke. He thirsted for slaughter and burned to kill M. Roux and Madame Bergeret. But his desire was feeble and evanescent. With the four canine teeth which he carried in his mouth and the nails of the carnivorous beast which armed his fingers, M. Bergeret had inherited the ferocity of the beast, but the original force of this instinct had largely disappeared. He did, it is true, feel a desire to kill M. Roux and Madame Bergeret, but it was a very feeble one. He felt fierce and cruel, but the sensation was so short-lived and so weak that no act was born of the thought, and even the expression of the idea was so swift that it entirely escaped the notice of the two witnesses who were most concerned in its manifestation. In less than a second M. Bergeret had ceased to be purely instinctive, primitive, and destructive, without, however, ceasing at the same time to be jealous and irritated. On the contrary, his indignation went on increasing. In this new frame of mind his thoughts were no longer simple; they began to centre round the social problem; confusedly there seethed in his mind fragments of ancient theologies, bits of the Decalogue, shreds of ethics, Greek, Scotch, German and French maxims, scattered portions of the moral code which, by striking his brain like so many flint stones, set him on fire. He felt patriarchal, the father of a family after the Roman style, an overlord and justiciar. He had the virtuous idea of punishing the guilty. After having wanted to kill Madame Bergeret and M. Roux by mere bloodthirsty instinct, he now wanted to kill them out of regard for justice. He mentally sentenced them to terrible and ignominious punishments. He lavished upon them every ignominy of mediæval custom. This journey across the ages of civilisation was longer than the first. It lasted for two whole seconds, and during that time the two culprits so discreetly changed their attitude that these changes, though imperceptible, were fundamental, and completely altered the character of their relationship.
Finally, religious and moral ideas becoming completely confounded with one another in his mind, M. Bergeret felt nothing but a sense of misery, while disgust, like a vast wave of dirty water, poured across the flame of his wrath. Three full seconds passed; he was plunged in the depths of irresolution and did nothing. By an obscure, confused instinct which was characteristic of his temperament, from the first moment he had turned his eyes away from the sofa and fixed them on the round table near the door. This was covered with a table-cloth of olive-green cotton on which were printed coloured figures of mediæval knights in imitation of ancient tapestry. During these three interminable seconds M. Bergeret clearly made out a little page-boy who held the helmet of one of the tapestry knights. Suddenly he noticed on the table, among the gilt-edged, red-bound books that Madame Bergeret had placed there as handsome ornaments, the yellow cover of the University Bulletin which he had left there the night before. The sight of this magazine instantly suggested to him the act most characteristic of his turn of mind: putting out his hand, he took up the Bulletin and left the drawing-room, which a most unlucky instinct had led him to enter.
Once alone in the dining-room a flood of misery overwhelmed him. He longed for the relief of tears, and was obliged to hold on by the chairs in order to prevent himself from falling. Yet with his pain was mingled a certain bitterness that acted like a caustic and burnt up the tears in his eyes. Only a few seconds ago he had crossed this little dining-room, yet now it seemed that, if ever he had set eyes on it before, it must have been in another life. It must surely have been in some far-off stage of existence, in some earlier incarnation, that he had lived in intimate relations with the small sideboard of carved oak, the mahogany shelves loaded with painted cups, the china plates on the wall, that he had sat at this round table between his wife and daughters. It was not his happiness that was dead, for he had never been happy; it was his poor little home life, his domestic relations that were gone. These had always been chilly and unpleasant, but now they were degraded and destroyed; they no longer even existed.
When Euphémie came in to lay the cloth he trembled at the sight of her; she seemed one of the ghosts of the vanished world in which he had once lived.
Shutting himself up in his study, he sat down at his table, and opening the University Bulletin quite at random, leant his head deliberately between his hands and, through sheer force of habit, began to read.
He read:
“Notes on the purity of language.—Languages are like nothing so much as ancient forests in which words have pushed a way for themselves, as chance or opportunity has willed. Among them we find some weird and even monstrous forms, yet, when linked together in speech, they compose into splendid harmonies, and it would be a barbarous act to prune them as one trims the lime-trees on the public roads. One must tread with reverence on what, in the grand style, is termed the boundless peaks....”
“And my daughters!” thought M. Bergeret. “She ought to have thought of them. She ought to have thought of our daughters....”
He went on reading without comprehending a word: