‘Ah, wait a moment!’ he said, one hand feeling his chest beneath his cloak. ‘That letter the postman brought just as I was coming out—it’s the answer, no doubt? Why, I was just going into the café to read it, and I forgot!—Really, I am breaking up!—Good! Here it is.’

Chaudval had just drawn a large envelope from his pocket.

He opened it, and there fell out a ministerial note which he picked up with feverish haste. He ran his eye through it under the red flame of the lamp-post.

‘My lighthouse! My warrant!’ he exclaimed. And ‘Saved, ye gods above!’ he added mechanically, as if from old habit, and in a falsetto so sudden, so different from his own, that he looked all round, imagining there must be some third party at hand.

‘Come, keep calm, and … be a man!’ he went on, after a moment.

But at those words, Esprit Chaudval, originally Lepeinteur, styled Monanteuil, stopped. It was as if he had been turned to a pillar of salt. The word seemed to have paralysed him.

‘Eh?’ he continued after a silence. ‘What was that wish just now?—To be a Man?—And after all, why not?’

He folded his arms, plunged in reflection.

‘For nearly half a century now I have been representing, I have been playing, the passions of others without even experiencing them. For, at bottom, I myself have never experienced anything. I am the likeness of these “others”, but only in play, never in earnest! So I’m no more than a shadow? Passion—emotions—real acts—real—these are what constitute a Man properly so-called! Well, age forces me to return into Humanity, so I must needs obtain passions for myself, or some real emotion…since that’s the sine qua non of any claim to the title of Man. There’s honest logic for you: it’s crammed full of sound sense!—So we must choose to experience something which will best accord with the nature I have at last brought back to life.’

He meditated awhile, and then went on in melancholy tones:

‘Love? Too late.—Fame? I’ve known it.—Ambition? Leave that trumpery stuff to the politicians!’

Suddenly a cry broke from him:

‘I’ve got it!’ he said. ‘Remorse! That is something to go with my dramatic temperament.’

He looked at himself in the glass, assuming a face convulsed and contracted as if by some unearthly horror.

‘That’s it!’ he concluded. ‘Nero! Macbeth! Orestes! Hamlet! Herostratus! Ghosts—yes! I want to see true ghosts! My time’s come! Just like all those people who had the luck never to be able to take one step without ghosts beside them.’

He struck his brow.

‘But how? I’m as innocent as an unborn lamb.’

And, again pausing, he went on:

‘Ah! Don’t let that stand in the way! Where there’s a will there’s a way. I’ve ample right to become what I ought to be, and at any price. I’ve a right to my Humanity!—To experience remorse, you must have committed crimes? Well, a fig for crimes! What do they matter, so long as it’s … in a good cause?—Yes.…