“Brute!” I replied.
“Very well, I shall administer a sedative.” He offered it to me, and I drank it. It stank of chloral.
Once more I am alone with Karl.
Songs of toads, light of stars, dawning of the moon, uprising of its red disc. Mystic assumption of the luminary from star to star. All the beauty of night....
Then a forgotten prayer—the petition of a little child—went up from my distress towards the paradise which yesterday seemed a myth, and now was a certainty. How had I ever doubted its existence?
And the moon wandered in the firmament like an aureole in search of a brow.
It was long since my eyelids had closed on tears. I fell into drowsy delirium. The buzzing in my ears became a hubbub. (There are certain noises almost imperceptible, which seem like the thunder of cataclysms far away.)
They were heaping up straw. That poultry-yard is exasperating. The bull was bellowing. I even had an illusion that it was bellowing louder and louder.
Did they bring it in every evening, along with the cows, into the stall of that strange farm?
Good Lord, what a row!