time enough to consider on the actual day. The actual moment of death did not seize hold of his mind either. "I will think about it after the sentence." Life was no longer boring, he was envisaging everything from a new point of view, he had no longer any ambition. He rarely thought about mademoiselle de la Mole. His passion of remorse engrossed him a great deal, and often conjured up the image of madame de Rênal, particularly during the silence of the night, which in this high turret was only disturbed by the song of the osprey.
He thanked heaven that he had not inflicted a mortal wound. "Astonishing," he said to himself, "I thought that she had destroyed my future happiness for ever by her letter to M. de la Mole, and here am I, less than a fortnight after the date of that letter, not giving a single thought to all the things that engrossed me then. An income of two or three thousand francs, on which to live quietly in a mountain district, like Vergy… I was happy then… I did not realise my happiness."
At other moments he would jump up from his chair. "If I had mortally wounded madame de Rênal, I would have killed myself… I need to feel certain of that so as not to horrify myself."
"Kill myself? That's the great question," he said to himself. "Oh, those judges, those fiends of red tape, who would hang their best citizen in order to win the cross… At any rate, I should escape from their control and from the bad French of their insults, which the local paper will call eloquence."
"I still have five or six weeks, more or less to live… Kill myself. No, not for a minute," he said to himself after some days, " Napoleon went on living."
"Besides, I find life pleasant, this place is quiet, I am not troubled with bores," he added with a smile, and he began to make out a list of the books which he wanted to order from Paris.
