Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part IV - VI
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which I had recoiled conscience-stricken. But she, the
adulteress, the murderess, had remained unmoved.
At Constance I caught the train for Basle. What a
wretched Sunday afternoon!
I prayed to God, if God there was, to preserve even
my bitterest foes from such agony.
At Basle I was overwhelmed with an irresistible desire
to revisit all those places in Switzerland where we had
stayed together, to gladden my sad heart with memories
of happy hours spent with her and the children.
I stayed for a week in Geneva and some days at Ouchy,
hunted by my misery from hotel to hotel, without peace
or rest, like a lost soul, like the wandering Jew. I spent
my nights in tears, haunted by the little figures of my
beloved children; I visited the places they had visited;
I fed “their” seagulls on the Lake of Geneva, a poor,
restless ghost, a miserable phantom.
Every morning I expected a letter from Marie, but
no letter came. She was too clever to furnish her
opponent with written evidence. I wrote to her several
times a day, love-letters, forgiving her for all her
crimes—but I never posted them.
Doubtless, my judges, if I had been destined to end
my days in a lunatic asylum, my fate would have come
upon me in those hours of keenest agony and bitterest
sorrow.
My power of endurance was exhausted; I wondered
whether Marie’s confession had not been a ruse, so as to
get rid of me and begin life all over again with her
unknown lover, or, perhaps, to live with her Danish
friend. I saw my children in the hands of a “stepfather”
or the clutches of a “stepmother”; Marie would be quite
rich with the proceeds of my collected works; she would
perhaps write the story of my life as seen through the eyes
of the unnatural woman who had come between us. The
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