I watched the green hill gliding past, and thought of the little white cottage with the green shutters which crowned it. My children lived there, but the home was desolate, they were without protection, without means.... An icy pang shot through my heart.
I was like the cocoon of the silkworm when the great steam-engine; slowly reels off the shining thread. At every stroke of the piston I grew thinner, and as the thread lengthened the cold which chilled me increased.
I was like an embryo prematurely detached from the umbilical cord. What a complete and living organism is the family! I had thought so at that first divorce, from which I had recoiled conscience-stricken. But she, the adulteress, the murderess, had remained unmoved.
At Constance I caught the train for Basle. What a wretched Sunday afternoon!
I prayed to God, if God there was, to preserve even my bitterest foes from such agony.
At Basle I was overwhelmed with an irresistible desire to revisit all those places in Switzerland where we had stayed together, to gladden my sad heart with memories of happy hours spent with her and the children.
I stayed for a week in Geneva and some days at Ouchy, hunted by my misery from hotel to hotel, without peace or rest, like a lost soul, like the wandering Jew. I spent my nights in tears, haunted by the little figures of my beloved children; I visited the places they had visited; I fed "their" seagulls on the Lake of Geneva, a poor, restless ghost, a miserable phantom.
Every morning I expected a letter from Marie, but no letter came. She was too clever to furnish her opponent with written evidence. I wrote to her several times a day, love-letters, forgiving her for all her crimes—but I never posted them.
Doubtless, my judges, if I had been destined to end my days in a lunatic asylum, my fate would have come upon me in those hours of keenest agony and bitterest sorrow.
My power of endurance was exhausted; I wondered whether Marie's confession had not been a ruse, so as to get rid of me and begin life all over again with her unknown lover, or, perhaps, to live with her Danish friend. I saw my children in the hands of a "stepfather" or the clutches of a "stepmother"; Marie would be quite rich with the proceeds of my collected works; she would perhaps write the story of my life as seen through the eyes of the unnatural woman who had come between us. The instinct of self-preservation stirred within me; I conceived a cunning plan. The separation from my family paralysed me mentally; I decided to return to them and stay with them until I had written the story of Marie's crimes. In this way she would become the unconscious tool of my revenge, which I could throw away when I had no further use for it.