multiplied by each of the sixty-four squares of the chess board—the abundant harvests of a thousand years were required to fill the last square. And he—how many wishes yet remained to him?—seven or eight at the outside. The unhappy man dared not look at himself either in the spring which lurked at the foot of one of the trees in the forest, or in the mirror that hung against the wall. He feared to render an exact account to himself of the time still left to him in which to exercise his power; he preferred to remain in the night of uncertainty than to face that terrible dawn which must rise when the night was over.
But still, there must be a way of continuing matters, so that the misfortunes of others should bring him good of some kind. He thought surely that if he had received a scientific education, instead of being a poor shoemaker, scarcely knowing how to read or cipher, he would have found out, by the aid of science, some combinations which would infallibly have procured for him both riches and happiness.
Poor fool! If he had been a man of learning, he would have known the legend of Doctor Faust. To what did the omnipotence conferred on him by Mephistopheles lead Faust, the dreamer, the thinker, the preeminent scholar? To the murder of Valentine! to Margaret’s suicide! to the pursuit of Helen of Troy, the pursuit of an empty shadow!
And, moreover, how could Thibault think coherently at all of ways and means while jealousy was raging in his heart, while he continued to picture Agnelette at the altar, giving herself for life to another than himself.
And who was that other? That wretched little Engoulevent, the man who had spied him out when he was perched in the tree, who had found his boar-spear in the bush, which had been the cause of the stripes he had received from Marcotte.
Ah! if he had but known! to him and not to Marcotte would he have willed that evil should befall! What was the physical torture he had