A crowd of hallucinations. A chaos of passions. Fury, lust, murderous desires, the sting of carnal embraces, the last stirring of the mud at the bottom of the pond….
"Ah! Will not the end come soon? Shall I not pluck you off, you leeches clinging to my body?… Then let my body perish with them!"
Stiffened in shoulders, loins, knees, Christophe thrust back the invisible enemy…. He was free…. Yonder, the music was still playing, farther and farther away. Dripping with sweat, broken in body, Christophe held his arms out towards it:
"Wait for me! Wait for me!"
He ran after it. He stumbled. He jostled and pushed his way…. He had run so fast that he could not breathe. Has heart beat, his blood roared and buzzed in his ears, like a train rumbling through a tunnel….
"God! How horrible!"
He made desperate signs to the orchestra not to go on without him…. At last! He came out of the tunnel!… Silence came again. He could hear once more.
"How lovely it is! How lovely! Encore! Bravely, my boys!… But who wrote it, who wrote it?… What do you say? You tell me that Jean-Christophe Krafft wrote it? Oh! come! Nonsense! I knew him. He couldn't write ten bars of such music as that!… Who is that coughing? Don't make such a noise!… What chord is that?… And that?… Not so fast! Wait!…"
Christophe uttered inarticulate cries; his hand, clutching the quilt, moved as if it were writing: and his exhausted brain went on mechanically trying to discover the elements of the chords and their consequents. He could not succeed: his emotion made him drop his prize. He began all over again…. Ah! This time it was too difficult….
"Stop, stop…. I can no more…."