In all weathers, summer or winter, rain or shine, he can be seen here and there, in the Camargue desert, sitting erect and melancholy on his horse, spear in hand.
He regrets Livette. He loves Zinzara. He weeps only for himself, the wretched creature! He has lost the paradise of affection he had dreamed of, and the appetizing hell of savage love he had tasted. He has nothing. It seems to him that Livette’s death, for which he blames himself, has left him free to abandon himself to his passion for the other; but the other is absent—and, though absent, she tortures him as relentlessly as on the day when, clinging to his horse’s mane, she defied him with insulting words, and aroused his passions, while he dared not shake her off, trample upon her, or seize her.
The memory of her is upon him like the gadfly that persists in following back the bloody track of its sting. Vainly does he shake himself; he cannot rid himself of it. Renaud loves Zinzara; he longs for her without hope, and, ruled by that single desire, he feels no other, so that the unexpended power of his youth accumulates within him and drives him mad.
The friends’ houses, the fêtes he used formerly to visit, have no further interest for him, because the only being he seeks cannot be found. The desert, once peopled with hopes in his eyes, has become an empty void. The roads that traverse it no longer lead anywhere.
He surprises himself sometimes, at night, bellowing with the bulls, against the wind that annoys them, toward the distant horizon. He is like one possessed. A devil dwells within him.
When he is weary of wandering about and of being in the saddle, and chooses to lie down and sleep for a day, he repairs to the cabin of his love, in the gargate, and there, full sure of being undisturbed, raves like a wild beast, in his frenzy at being alone. In the morning, he emerges from his retreat, more depressed, more miserable, more haunted with visions than ever.
At times, he fancies that he sees Livette under his horse’s feet, imploring wildly, with hands outstretched—but he digs his spurs into his horse and rides on. A terrible shriek constantly rings in his ears.
He rides toward another spectre that calls him from the farthest point of the horizon.—He says, to any one who cares to listen, that he has come from Egypt, where he was a king, and that he will return there some day, King of Camargue.
His disordered mind seems the very incarnation of the wild moor. He fancies that he is flying about in circles with the birds of the swamps that weep in the drizzling rain. The mistral lashes his wings. When the wind blows through his hair, he pities the poor grass of the plains because the mistral is torturing it.
All the lamentations of the reeds and swamps, of the river and the sea, are but the ringing in his ears, and their loud wailing is constantly punctuated by a shriek—oh! so heart-rending it is!—the shriek of Livette!