noticed inclinations, which he had instantly driven away from him, might after all have been the real things he should have lived for, and that everything else might not have been so. And his official duties, and his theory of life, and his family, and his social and official interests—all this might not have been the real thing; he tried to defend it all to himself. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was no use defending it.
"And if it is so," he said to himself, "and I am departing from life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given to me, and it is impossible to put it right again, what then?"
He lay on his back, and began to go over his whole life anew.
When, in the morning, he saw the lackey and then his wife, and then his daughter, and then the doctor, all their movements, all their words, confirmed to him the terrible truth which had been revealed to him in the night. He saw in them himself and all that for which he had lived, and he saw plainly that it was all not the real thing—it was all a frightful, immense deception, obscuring both life and death. The consciousness of this increased his physical sufferings tenfold. He groaned and flung himself about, and tore off his clothes; they seemed to stifle and oppress him, and therefore he hated them.
They gave him a large dose of opium, he lost consciousness, but at dinner-time the whole thing began over again. He drove them all away from him, and tossed from side to side.
His wife came to him and said: " Jean, my darling,
