And yet, when the morrow came, Emile, instead of feeling inspired by all the force of his determination, felt so exhausted by insomnia, and so overwhelmed by sadness, that he feared his own weakness and did not speak. Indeed, what can be more painful, when the heart has revelled in a blissful dream, than to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with a cruel reality? When one has enjoyed all by oneself the delicious secret of a chastely hidden passion, to be forced to reveal it in cold blood to those who do not understand it or who scorn it?
Whether Emile should make the avowal to his father or to Janille, he must lay bare his heart, filled as it was with a modest languor and a holy ecstasy, to hearts that had never known or had long been closed to sentiments of that nature. And he had dreamed of such a sublime dénouement! Should not Gilberte, alone with him under the eye of God, be the first to receive in her heart the sacred word love when it should escape from his lips?
The world and the laws of honor, so unfeeling in such cases, were to deprive the virginity of his passion of all that was purest and most ideal about it! He suffered intensely, and it seemed to him that a century of bitter sorrow had elapsed between his dreams of the day before and the gloomy day that was beginning.
He mounted his horse, determined to seek at a distance, in some solitary spot, the calm and resignation necessary to enable him to withstand the first shock. He intended to avoid Châteaubrun; but he found himself near the ruin, unconscious how he had come thither. He rode by without turning his head, ascended the rough road where, in the howling storm, he had first seen the château by the light of the lightning flashes. He recognized the rocks behind which he had found shelter with Jean Jappeloup, and he could not realize that more than two months had passed since that night when he was so light-hearted, so self-controlled, so different from what he had since become.
He rode on toward Eguzon, in order to see once more the whole of the road he had then passed over, as he had not visited it since. But when he reached the first houses, the sight of the villagers scrutinizing him caused the same thrill of horror and misanthropy which Monsieur de Boisguilbault would have been likely to feel at such a time. He turned sharply into a dark, wooded road at his left and rode into the country, without any definite goal.
This rough but fascinating road, passing now over broad, flat rocks, now over the fresh green sward, now over fine sand, and bordered by venerable chestnuts with furrowed trunks and enormous roots, conducted him to vast moors, where he rode slowly along, content to be alone at last in a desolate region. The road stretched before him, sometimes in zigzag fashion, sometimes straight up and down, through fields covered with broom and furze, and over sandy hillocks intersected by brooks that had no well-defined bed and no fixed course.
From time to time a partridge skimmed along the grass at his feet, or a kingfisher flew like an arrow across a swamp, a flash of blue and fiery red.
After an hour's ride, being still absorbed in his thoughts, he saw that the path became narrower, plunged into the bushes, and finally disappeared under his feet. He raised his eyes and saw before him, beyond steep precipices and deep ravines, the ruins of Crozant rising like a sharp arrow over curiously jagged peaks of such extent that one could hardly embrace the whole at a single glance.
Emile had already visited that interesting fortress, but by a more direct road, and as his preoccupation had prevented him from taking his bearings, he was uncertain for a moment where he was. Nothing could be more consonant with his frame of mind than that wild locality and those desolate ruins. He left his horse at a hut and descended on foot the narrow path that led down to the bed of the torrent by a series of steps cut in the rock. Then he ascended by similar means and buried himself in the ruins, where he remained for several hours, a prey to an intensity of suffering which the aspect of a spot that was so horrifying and so sublime exalted at times almost to delirium.
Few fortresses so advantageously situated as that of Crozant were erected in the first centuries of feudalism. The mountain on which it stands descends perpendicularly on all sides, to two mountain streams, the Creuse and the Sédelle, which unite tumultuously at the end of the peninsula and keep up a constant roaring as they leap over huge fragments of stone. The sides of the mountain are very peculiar, bristling everywhere with long, grayish rocks, which rise from the abyss like giants or hang like stalactites over the torrent.