Without an object, he had himself driven at random through the interminable streets of the huge city. Small, dark houses succeeded to small, dark houses, squares with railings and miserable trees, open spaces with discoloured statues, and boundless parks with herbage browsed by flocks, opened up at distant intervals. Over the monstrous ant-hill extended the vault of a sooty sky. Sometimes the said sky was wholly drowned in a yellow fog; at other times the mist broke in pelting rain, or else there was a dim, cold azure in which coal-dust seemed to be floating. A population was hurrying along these streets, but Armand did not recognise a single face, and he would go on thus for whole hours, alone with his thought as when he awoke, and dressed, and ate—with that thought which was always present and was always similar to itself.
And what was it that was shown him by this fixed and torturing thought? Unceasingly, unceasingly Helen, and the terrible confession during their last interview showed itself in all its details, and he could see the act which she had avowed in terms so pitilessly precise and clear. She was evoked before him in the arms of De Varades; for he told himself that after the first crisis of despair she must have relapsed again, and the vision inflicted upon him a feeling which he again compared to a weight upon his heart, crushing it with sadness.
This dull weight had descended upon it on the day when she had lamented so tragically in the drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln. And, as on that occasion, he endured an unbearable oppression in knowing himself to be the cause of this woman's misery. After the present intrigue with De Varades, doubtless she would have others. Is there ever a check on that slippery incline which leads from the second lover to the tenth? When the habit and power of self-respect, that unique principle of all dignity, has been lost, what dike can be opposed to the invading flood of temptation and curiosity? Helen was beautiful and would be courted. Her successive falls occurred by anticipation now beneath his eyes, he could do nothing to prevent them, and it was he, as she had exclaimed through her tears, it was he who had ruined her.
In presence of the image of this woman's life, he felt as though set over against a being for whom he had poured out poison with his own hands. The mortal discomposure of the face, the cold sweat, the terrible convulsions, how could these be prevented when the fatal drug was flowing in her blood? The venom of adultery with which he had infected this creature would accomplish its work of destruction. What excuse had he for having done this? None, seeing that he had taken her without loving her. Yes, if only he had loved her, if he had repaid her a little happiness in exchange for the gift of her person!
But to the inevitable humiliation of guilt he had united another ground of humiliation, namely, the most cruel disillusion. Of a child rich in hopes, and led astray by a generous seeking after the most elevated feelings, what had he made? One undeceived and in quest of forgetfulness. What would she be in a year, and then in another year, and in yet another? He repeated the celebrated phrase: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." And he bent beneath the weight of remorse, a weight so heavy, ah! so cruelly heavy, that he was rendered incapable of any experience save that overwhelming, continuous crushing beneath the thought of the act committed.
"What an absurd machine man is," he thought, "and what contemptible weakness this distress! To justify such remorse I should of necessity be guilty, that is so say, responsible and free. Is not freedom an empty word, as also in consequence good and evil, virtue and vice?"
He had thought much on these questions in his youth, and had allowed as accurate the chief modern arguments against the freedom of the will. He studied himself that, by applying them to his own case, he might destroy the moral misery that affected him.
"What am I?" he went on; "the product of a certain heredity placed in a certain environment. The circumstances once given, I could not but feel as I felt, think as I thought, desire as I desired."
And he decomposed his own personality into its elements, as he had done only too often in his periods of "Hamletism," as he called his analytic crises of inward paralysis. He recognised the first beginning of his egotism in the absence of family life; he took cognisance of the fact that college life had too early polluted his imagination, and the sight of the slaughter in the civil war too early awaked his misanthropy. He could see himself losing his religious faith by precocious reading, becoming uninterested in all ambition for lack of a cause in which he could believe, and because he was rich enough to live without a profession. Then he watched the long, useless, and fatal series of his love experiences unfold itself down to the hour when he had met Madame Chazel.
"How could I have judged of her otherwise than I did?" he went on. "She in a measure threw herself at my head. Could I understand that this was the madness of a romantic, irrational, but sincere nature? I thought she was a woman like the rest. I thought so, and it was inevitable that I should think so."