“It’s your imagination.”
“I only wish it were! But what’s to be done? When falsehood takes the place of truth, truth must needs dissemble. As for me, with this mission that has been entrusted to me (I’ll tell you about it presently), placed as I am between the Lodge and the Society of Jesus, it’s all up with me. I am an object of suspicion to everyone; everything is an object of suspicion to me. Suppose I were to confess to you, my dear Julius, that just now when you met my distress with mockery, I actually doubted whether it was really you to whom I was talking—whether you weren’t an imitation Julius.... Suppose I were to tell you that this morning before I met you, I actually doubted my own reality—doubted whether I was really here in Rome—whether I wasn’t just dreaming—and whether I shouldn’t wake up presently at Pau, lying peacefully beside Arnica, back again in my everyday life.”
“My dear fellow, you’ve got fever.”
Fleurissoire seized his hand and in a voice trembling with emotion:
“Fever!” he cried. “You’re right! It’s fever I’ve got—a fever that cannot—that must not be cured; a fever which I hoped would take you too when you heard what I had to reveal—which I hoped—yes, I own it—you too would catch from me, my brother, so that we might burn together in its consuming fires.... But no! I see only too clearly now that the path I follow—the dark and dangerous path I am called upon to follow—must needs be solitary too; your own words have proved it to me. What, Julius? Can it be true? He is not to be seen? No one succeeds in seeing him?”
“My dear fellow,” said Julius, disengaging himself from his clasp and in his turn laying a hand on the excited Amédée’s arm, “my dear fellow, I will now confess something I didn’t dare tell you just now. When I found myself in the Holy Father’s presence ... well, I was seized with a fit of absent-mindedness....”
“Absent-mindedness?” repeated Fleurissoire, aghast.
“Yes. I suddenly caught myself thinking of something else.”
“Am I really to believe you?”
“For it was precisely at that very moment that I had my revelation. ‘Well, but,’ said I to myself, pursuing my first idea, ‘supposing the evil action—the crime—is gratuitous, it will be impossible to impute it to its perpetrator and impossible, therefore, to convict him.’”