XII
Palmer sailed for America, bearing with dignity a very deep wound, but utterly unable to admit that he had been mistaken. He had an obstinate streak in his mind, which sometimes reacted upon his disposition, but only to make him do this or that thing with resolution, not to make him persist in a painful and really difficult undertaking. He had believed that he was capable of curing Thérèse of her fatal love, and he had performed that miracle by his enthusiastic and, if you please, imprudent faith; but he lost the fruit just as he was on the point of plucking it, because, when the last test came, his faith failed him.
It should be said also, that, in establishing a genuine, serious connection between two persons, nothing can be more unfortunate than an attempt to take possession too quickly of a heart that has been broken. The dawn of such a connection is attended by the noblest illusions; but jealousy of the past is an incurable disease, and stirs up storms which even old age does not always dispel.
If Palmer had been a really strong man, or if his strength had been calmer and less unreasoning, he might have saved Thérèse from the disasters that he foresaw for her. It was his duty to do it, perhaps, for she had confided herself to him with a sincerity and disinterestedness worthy of solicitude and respect; but many who aspire to strength of character and believe that they possess it possess nothing more than energy, and Palmer was one of those as to whom one may be mistaken for a long while. Such as he was, he surely deserved Thérèse’s regrets. We shall see ere long that he was capable of the noblest impulses and the bravest deeds. His whole mistake consisted in believing in the unassailable duration of that which in him was simply a spontaneous effort of the will.
Laurent knew nothing at first of Palmer’s departure for America; he was dismayed to find that Thérèse, too, had gone away without bidding him adieu. He had received from her only these few words:
“You are the only person in France who knew of my projected marriage to Palmer. The marriage is broken off. Keep our secret. I am going away.”
As she wrote these ice-cold words to Laurent, Thérèse was conscious of a bitter feeling toward him. Was not that fatal child the cause of all the misfortunes and all the sorrows of her life?
She soon felt, however, that this time her irritation was unjust. Laurent had behaved admirably toward both Palmer and herself during that wretched week which had ruined everything. After the first outburst, he had accepted the situation with perfect good faith, and had done his utmost not to give offence to Palmer. He had not once sought to take advantage with Thérèse of her fiancé’s unjust suspicions. He had never failed to speak of him with respect and affection. By a strange concatenation of circumstances, it was he who had the dignified rôle during that week. And Thérèse could not help realizing that, although Laurent was sometimes insane to the point of downright atrocity, his mind was never open to any base or despicable thought.
During the three months which followed Palmer’s departure, Laurent continued to show that he was worthy of Thérèse’s friendship. He had succeeded in discovering her retreat, and he did nothing to disturb her tranquillity. He wrote to her, complaining mildly of the coldness of her adieu, and reproaching her for not having confidence in him in her sorrows, for not treating him like a brother; “was he not created and brought into the world to serve her, to console her, to avenge her at need?” Then followed questions to which Thérèse was forced to reply. Had Palmer insulted her? Should he go to him and demand satisfaction? Did I do anything imprudent, which wounded you? Have you any reproach to bring against me? God knows, I did not think it! If I am the cause of your suffering, scold me, and if I am not the cause of it, tell me that you will allow me to weep with you.
Thérèse justified Richard without entering into any explanations. She forbade Laurent to mention his name to her. In her generous determination to leave no stain on her fiancé’s memory, she allowed him to believe that she alone was responsible for the rupture. Perhaps the result was to revive in Laurent’s heart hopes which she had no purpose of reviving; but there are situations in which one bungles, whatever one may do, and rushes onward, impelled by fatality, to one’s destruction.
Laurent’s letters were infinitely gentle and affectionate. He wrote without art, without pretension in the way of style, and often in bad taste and incorrectly. He was sometimes honestly emphatic, and sometimes childish without prudery. With all their defects, his letters were dictated by a depth of conviction which made them irresistibly persuasive, and one could feel in every word the fire of youth and the effervescent energy of an artist of genius.
Moreover, Laurent began to work with great ardor, thoroughly resolved never to return to his former dissolute habits. His heart bled at the thought of the privations Thérèse had imposed upon herself in order to provide him with the variety, the bracing air, and the renewed health of the journey to Switzerland. He had determined to pay his debt at the earliest possible moment.
Thérèse soon began to feel that the affection of her poor child, as he still called himself, was very pleasant to her, and that, if it could continue as it was, it would be the best and purest sentiment of his life.
She encouraged him by motherly replies to persevere in the path of toil to which he said that he had returned forever. Her letters were sweet, resigned, and breathed a chaste affection; but Laurent soon detected a strain of mortal sadness in them. Thérèse admitted that she was slightly ill, and she sometimes had thoughts of death at which she laughed with heart-rending melancholy. She was really ill. Without love and without work, ennui was consuming her. She had carried with her a small sum of money, which was all that remained of what she had earned at Genoa, and she used it with the strictest economy, in order to remain in the country as long as possible. She had conceived a horror of Paris. And then it is possible that there had gradually stolen over her a longing and at the same time a sort of dread to see Laurent once more, changed, resigned, and improved in every way, as his letters showed him to be.
She hoped that he would marry; as he had once had an inclination in that direction, that excellent plan might occur to him again. She encouraged him to do it. He said sometimes yes and sometimes no. Thérèse constantly anticipated that some trace of the old love would appear in Laurent’s letters: it did crop out a little now and then, but always with exquisite delicacy; and the prevailing characteristic of these veiled references to ill-disguised sentiment was a delightful tenderness, an effusive sensibility, a sort of ardent filial devotion.
When the winter arrived, Thérèse, finding that she had come to the end of her resources, was obliged to return to Paris, where her patrons were and her duties to herself. She concealed her return from Laurent, preferring not to see him again too soon; but, impelled by some mysterious power of divination, he passed through the unfrequented street on which the little house stood. He saw that the shutters were down, and he went in, drunk with joy. It was an ingenuous, almost child-like joy, which would have made a suspicious, reserved attitude utterly ridiculous and prudish. He left Thérèse to dine alone, begging her to come in the evening to his studio, to see a picture which he had just finished and upon which he was absolutely determined to have her opinion before sending it away. It was sold and paid for; but, if she had any criticism to make upon it, he would work at it a few days more. The deplorable days had passed when Thérèse “was no connoisseur, when she had the narrow, realistic judgment peculiar to portrait-painters, when she was incapable of comprehending a work of the imagination,” etc. Now she was “his muse and his inspiration. Without the aid of her divine breath, he could do nothing. With her advice and encouragement, his talent would fulfil all its promises.”
Thérèse forgot the past, and, while she was not too much bewildered by the present, she did not think that she ought to refuse what an artist never refuses a fellow-artist. After dinner, she took a cab and went to Laurent’s studio.
She found the studio illuminated, and the picture in a magnificent light. It was a most excellent and beautiful picture. That peculiar genius had the faculty of making, while in repose, more rapid progress than is always attained by those who work most persistently. As a result of his travelling and his illness, there had been a gap of a year in his work, and it seemed that, by reflection simply, he had thrown off the defects of his earlier exuberance of fancy. At the same time, he had acquired new qualities which one would hardly have deemed consistent with his nature—accuracy of drawing, more agreeable choice of subjects, charm of execution—everything that was likely to please the public without lowering him in the estimation of artists.
Thérèse was touched and enchanted. She expressed her admiration in the warmest terms. She said to him everything that she deemed best adapted to make the noble pride of talent vanquish all the wretched enthusiasms of the past. She found nothing to criticise, and even forbade him to retouch any part of it.
Laurent, albeit modest in manners and language, had more pride than Thérèse gave him credit for. In the depth of his heart he was enraptured by her praise. He had a feeling that she was the shrewdest and most conscientious of all those who were capable of appreciating him. He felt, too, a violent recrudescence of the old longing for her to share his artistic joys and sorrows, and that hope of becoming a master, that is to say, a man, which she only could revive in his moments of weakness.
When Thérèse had gazed a long while at the picture, she turned to look at a figure as to which Laurent desired her opinion, saying that she would be even more pleased with it; but, instead of a canvas, Thérèse saw her mother, with smiling face, standing in the doorway of Laurent’s chamber.
Madame C—— had come to Paris, not knowing just what day Thérèse would return. This visit was occasioned by serious business: her son was to be married, and Monsieur C—— himself had been in Paris for some time. Thérèse’s mother having learned from her that she had renewed her correspondence with Laurent, and dreading the future, had called upon him unexpectedly to say to him all that a mother can say to a man, to prevent his making her daughter unhappy.
Laurent was gifted with eloquence of the heart. He had reassured this poor mother, and had detained her, saying:
“Thérèse is coming here, and I propose to swear to her at your feet that I will always be to her whichever she may choose, her brother or her husband, but in any event her slave.”
It was a very pleasant surprise for Thérèse to find her mother there, for she did not expect to see her so soon. They embraced with tears of joy. Laurent led them to a small salon filled with flowers, where tea was served in sumptuous fashion. Laurent was rich, he had just earned ten thousand francs. He was proud and happy to be able to repay Thérèse all that she had expended for him. He was adorable that evening; he won the daughter’s heart and the mother’s confidence, and yet he had the delicacy not to say a word of love to Thérèse. Far from that, as he kissed the clasped hands of the two women, he exclaimed with absolute sincerity that that was the loveliest day of his life, and that never had he felt so happy and so self-contented when he and Thérèse were alone.
Madame C—— first broached the subject of marriage to Thérèse some days later. That poor woman, who had sacrificed everything to external appearances, who, despite her domestic sorrows, believed that she had done well, could not endure the idea of her daughter being cast off by Palmer, and she thought that Thérèse might set herself right in the eyes of the world by making another choice. Laurent was famous and much in vogue. Never could there be a better assorted marriage. The young but great artist had reformed. Thérèse possessed an influence over him which had dominated the most violent crisis of his painful transformation. He had an unconquerable attachment for her. It had become a duty on the part of both of them to weld anew and forever a chain which had never been completely severed, and which could never be, strive as hard as they might.
Laurent excused his past offences by very specious reasoning. Thérèse, he said, had spoiled him at the outset by too great gentleness and resignation. If, at the time of his first ingratitude, she had shown that she was offended, she would have corrected his wretched habit, contracted with low women, of yielding to his impulses and his caprices. She would have taught him the respect a man owes to the woman who has given herself to him through love.
Another consideration, too, which Laurent made the most of in his defence, and which seemed more weighty, was this, which he had already suggested in his letters.
“Probably,” he said to her, “I was ill, although I did not know it, when I wronged you the first time. A brain-fever seems to strike you like the lightning, and yet it is impossible to believe that in a young, strong man there has not taken place, perhaps long beforehand, a terrible revolution by which his reason has already been disturbed, and under which his will has been unable to react. Is not that just what took place in me, my poor Thérèse, when that sickness was coming on which nearly killed me? Neither you nor I could understand it; and, as for myself, it often happened that I woke in the morning and thought of your grief of the preceding day, unable to distinguish between the dreams I had just dreamed and the reality. You know that I could not work, that the place where we were aroused an unhealthy aversion in my mind, that I had had an extraordinary hallucination in the forest of ——; and that, when you gently reproached me for certain cruel words and certain unjust accusations, I listened to you with a dazed air, thinking that you were the one who had dreamed it all. Poor woman! I accused you of being mad! You must see that I was mad, and can you not forgive involuntary offences? Compare my conduct after my illness with what it was before! Was it not like a reawakening of my heart? Did you not suddenly find me as trustful, as submissive, as devoted, as I had been cynical, irritable, and selfish, before that crisis which restored me to my senses? And have you had any reason to reproach me from that moment? Did I not bow to your marriage to Palmer as a punishment I had earned? You saw me almost dead with grief at the thought that I was going to lose you forever: did I say a word against your fiancé? If you had bade me run after him, and even to blow out my own brains in order to bring him back to you, I would have done it, so absolutely do my heart and my life belong to you! Do you want me to do it now? If my existence embarrasses you or makes you unhappy, say but a word, I am ready to put an end to it. Say a word, Thérèse, and you will never again hear the name of this wretched creature, who has no other desire than to live or die for you.”
Thérèse’s character had grown weaker in this twofold love, which, in fact, had been simply two acts of the same drama; except for that outraged, shattered passion, Palmer would never have thought of marrying her, and the effort that she had made to pledge herself to him was, perhaps, nothing more than the reaction of despair. Laurent had never disappeared from her life, since Palmer’s constant argument, in seeking to convince her, had been to refer to the deplorable results of that liaison which he wished to make her forget and which he seemed fatally impelled to recall to her mind over and over again.
And then the renewal of friendship after the rupture had been, so far as Laurent was concerned, a genuine renewal of passion; whereas, to Thérèse, it had been a new phase of devotion, more refined and more touching than love itself. She had suffered from Palmer’s desertion, but not in a cowardly way. She still had strength to meet injustice; indeed, we may say that was her whole strength. She was not one of those women who are everlastingly suffering and complaining, overflowing with useless regrets and insatiable longings. A violent reaction was taking place in her, and her intelligence, which was abundantly developed, naturally helped it on. She conceived an exalted idea of moral liberty, and when another’s love and faith failed her, she had the righteous pride not to dispute the tattered compact, shred by shred. She even took pleasure in the idea of restoring freedom and repose, generously and without reproach, to whoever reclaimed them.
But she had become much weaker than in her earlier womanhood, in the sense that she had recovered the craving to love and to have faith, which had been long benumbed by a disaster of exceptional severity. She had fancied for a long time that she could live thus, and that art would be her only passion. She had made a mistake, and she could no longer indulge in any illusions concerning the future. It was necessary for her to love, and her greatest misfortune was that it was necessary for her to love gently and self-sacrificingly, and to satisfy at any price the maternal impulse which was, as it were, a fatal element of her nature and her life. She had become accustomed to suffering for some one, she longed to suffer still, and if that longing, strange, it is true, but well characterized in certain women, and in certain men as well, had made her less merciful to Palmer than to Laurent, it was because Palmer had seemed to her too strong himself to need her devotion. So that Palmer had erred in offering her support and consolation. Thérèse had missed the feeling that she was necessary to that man, who wished her to think of no one but herself.
Laurent, who was more ingenuous, had that peculiar charm of which she was fatally enamored—weakness! He made no secret of it, he proclaimed that touching infirmity of his genius with transports of sincerity and inexhaustible emotion. Alas! he, too, erred. He was not really weak, any more than Palmer was really strong. He had his hours, he always talked like a child of heaven, and as soon as his weakness had won the day, he recovered his strength to make others suffer, as is the wont of all the children whom we adore.
Laurent was in the clutches of an inexorable fatality. He said so himself in his lucid moments. It seemed as if, born of the intercourse of two angels, he had nursed at the breast of a Fury, and had retained in his blood a leaven of frenzy and despair. He was one of those persons, more plentiful than is generally supposed in the human race, in both sexes, who, although endowed with all sublimity of thought and all the noble impulses of the heart, never attain the full extent of their faculties without falling at once into a sort of intellectual epilepsy.
And then, too, he was, like Palmer, inclined to undertake the impossible, which is to try to graft happiness upon despair, and to taste the divine joys of conjugal faith and of sacred friendship upon the ruins of a newly devastated past. Those two hearts, bleeding from the wounds they had received, were sadly in need of repose: Thérèse implored it with the sorrow born of a ghastly presentiment; but Laurent fancied that he had lived ten centuries during the ten months of their separation, and he became ill with the exuberance of a desire of the heart, which should have terrified Thérèse more than a desire of the senses.
Unfortunately, she allowed herself to be reassured by the nature of that desire. Laurent seemed to be so far regenerated as to have restored moral love to the place it should occupy in the front rank, and he was once more alone with Thérèse, but did not worry her as before by his outbreaks of frenzy. He was able to talk with her for hours at a time with the most sublime affection—he who had long believed that he was dumb, he said, and who at last felt his genius spreading its wings and taking its flight to a loftier realm! He made himself a part of Thérèse’s future by constantly pointing out to her that she had a sacred duty to perform toward him, the duty of sheltering him from the mad impulses of youth, from the unworthy ambitions of middle life, and the depraved selfishness of old age. He talked to her of himself, always of himself. Why not? He talked so well! Through her means, he would be a great artist, a great heart, a great man; she owed him that, because she had saved his life! And Thérèse, with the fatal simplicity of loving hearts, came at last to look upon this reasoning as irrefutable, and to regard as a duty what she had at first been implored to grant as a proof of forgiveness.
So Thérèse at last consented to weld anew that fatal chain; but she was happily inspired to postpone the marriage, desiring to test Laurent’s resolution on that point, and fearing an irrevocable engagement for his sake. If her own happiness alone had been involved, the imprudent creature would have bound herself forever.
Thérèse’s first happiness did not last a whole week, as a merry ballad sadly says; the second did not last twenty-four hours. Laurent’s reactions were sudden and violent, in proportion to the intensity of his enjoyment. We say his reactions, Thérèse said his retractations, and that was the more accurate word. He obeyed that inexorable longing which some young men feel to kill or destroy anything that arouses their passions. These cruel instincts have been observed in men of widely varying natures, and history has stigmatized them as perverse instincts; it would be more just to describe them as instincts perverted either by a disease of the brain contracted amid the surroundings in which the men in question were born, or by the impunity, fatal to the reason, which certain conditions assured them from their first steps in life. We have heard of young kings murdering fawns to which they seemed to be much attached, solely for the pleasure of seeing their entrails quiver. Men of genius, too, are kings in the environment in which they mature; indeed, they are absolute kings, who are intoxicated by their power. There are some who are tormented by the thirst for domination, and whose joy, when their domination is assured, excites them to frenzy.
Such was Laurent, in whom two entirely distinct natures struggled for mastery. One would have said that two souls, having fought for the privilege of vivifying his body, were engaged in a desperate conflict to drive each other out. Between those contrary impulsions the poor wretch lost his free will, and fell exhausted every day after the victory of the angel or the demon who fought over his body.
And when he analyzed himself, it seemed to him sometimes that he was reading in a book of magic, and could discern with marvellous and appalling lucidity the key to the mysterious spells of which he was the victim.
“Yes,” he said to Thérèse, “I am undergoing the phenomenon which the thaumaturgists called possession. Two spirits have acquired mastery over me. Is one of them really a good and one an evil spirit? No, I do not think so: the one who terrifies you, the sceptical, violent, frantic one, does ill only because he is not able to do good as he understands it. He would like to be calm, philosophical, playful, tolerant; the other does not choose that he shall be so. He wishes to play his part of good angel; he seeks to be fervent, enthusiastic, single-hearted, devoted; and as his adversary mocks at him, denies him, and insults him, he becomes morose and cruel in his turn, so that the two angels together bring forth a demon.”
And Laurent said and wrote to Thérèse on this strange subject sentences no less beautiful than appalling, which seemed to be true and to add further privileges to the impunity he had apparently arrogated to himself with respect to her.
All that Thérèse had feared that she would suffer on Laurent’s account if she became Palmer’s wife, she suffered on Palmer’s account when she became for the second time Laurent’s companion. Ghastly retrospective jealousy, the worst of all forms of jealousy, because it takes offence at everything and can be sure of nothing, gnawed the unhappy artist’s heart and sowed madness in his brain. The memory of Palmer became a spectre, a vampire to him. He obstinately insisted that Thérèse should tell him all the details of her life at Genoa and Porto Venere, and, as she refused, he accused her of having tried to deceive him! Forgetting that at that time Thérèse had written to him: I love Palmer, and that a little later she had written to him: I am going to marry him, he reproached her with having always held in a firm and treacherous hand the chain of hope and desire which bound him to her. Thérèse placed all their correspondence before him, and he admitted that she had said to him all that loyalty called upon her to say to cut him loose from her. He became calmer, and agreed that she had handled his half-extinct passion with excessive delicacy, telling him the whole truth little by little, as he showed a disposition to receive it without pain, and also as she gained confidence in the future toward which Palmer was leading her. He admitted that she had never told him anything resembling a falsehood, even when she had refused to explain herself, and that immediately after his illness, when he was still deluding himself with the idea of a possible reconciliation, she had said to him: “All is at an end between us. What I have determined upon and accepted for myself is my secret, and you have no right to question me.”
“Yes, yes; you are right!” cried Laurent. “I was unjust, and my fatal curiosity is a torment which it is a veritable crime for me to seek to make you share. Yes, dear Thérèse, I subject you to humiliating questions, you who owed me nothing more than oblivion, and who generously granted me a full pardon! I have changed rôles; I draw an indictment against you, forgetting that I am the culprit and the condemned! I try to tear away with an impious hand the veils of modesty in which your heart is entitled, and doubtless in duty bound, to envelop itself touching all that concerns your relations with Palmer. I thank you for your proud silence. I esteem you all the more for it. It proves to me that you never allowed Palmer to question you touching the mysteries of our sorrows and our joys. And now I understand that not only does a woman not owe these private confidences to her lover, but it is her duty to refuse them. The man who asks for them degrades the woman he loves. He calls upon her to do a dastardly thing, at the same time that he debases her in his mind, by associating her image with those of all the phantoms that beset him. Yes, Thérèse, you are right; one must work on his own account to maintain the purity of his ideal; and I am forever straining every nerve to profane it and cast it forth from the temple I had built for it!”
It would seem that after such protestations, and when Laurent declared his readiness to sign them with his blood and his tears, tranquillity should have been restored and happiness have begun. But such was not the case. Laurent, consumed by secret rage, returned the next day to his questions, his insults, his sarcasms. Whole nights were passed in deplorable disputes, in which it seemed that he had an absolute craving to work upon his own genius with the lash, to wound it and torture it, in order to make it fruitful in abusive language of truly appalling eloquence, and to drive both Thérèse and himself to the uttermost limits of despair. After these hurricanes, there seemed to be nothing left for them to do but to kill themselves together. Thérèse constantly expected it and was always ready, for life was horrible to her; but Laurent had not as yet had that thought. Exhausted by fatigue he would fall asleep, and his good angel seemed to return to watch over his slumber and bring to his face the divine smile of celestial visions.
It was an incredible, but fixed and invariable, rule of that strange character, that sleep changed all his resolutions. If he fell asleep with his heart overflowing with affection, he was sure to wake with his mind eager for battle and murder; and on the other hand, if he had gone away cursing the night before, he would return in the morning to bless.
Three times Thérèse left him and fled from Paris; three times he went after her and forced her to forgive his despair; for as soon as he had lost her he adored her, and began anew to implore her with all the tears of exalted repentance.
Thérèse was at once miserable and sublime in that hell into which she had plunged the second time, closing her eyes and sacrificing her life. She carried devotion to the point of acts of self-immolation which made her friends shudder, and which sometimes brought upon her the blame, almost the scorn, of certain proud and virtuous people who did not know what it is to love.
Moreover, this love of Thérèse for Laurent was incomprehensible to herself. She was not drawn on by her passions, for Laurent, besmirched by the debauchery into which he plunged anew to kill a love which he could not destroy by his will, had become a more disgusting object than a dead body to her. She no longer had any caresses for him, and he no longer dared ask her for them. She was no longer vanquished and swayed by the charm of his eloquence and the child-like grace of his penitence. She could no longer believe in the morrow; and the superb outbursts of emotion, which had reconciled them so many times, were no longer anything more in her eyes than alarming symptoms of storm and shipwreck.
What attached her to him was that all-embracing compassion which one inevitably acquires as a habit toward those to whom one has forgiven much. Pardon seems to engender pardon even to satiety, to foolish weakness. When a mother has said to herself that her child is incorrigible, and that he must either die or kill some one, there is nothing left for her to do except to abandon him or to accept him as he is. Thérèse had been mistaken every time that she had thought to cure Laurent by abandoning him. It is very true that he seemed to improve at such times, but only because he hoped to obtain his pardon. When he ceased to hope, he plunged recklessly into dissipation and idleness. Then she returned to rescue him, and succeeded in making him work for a few days. But how dearly she had to pay for the little good she succeeded in doing him! When he became disgusted once more with a regular life, he could not find enough invectives with which to reproach her for trying to make of him “what her patron saint Thérèse Levasseur had made of Jean-Jacques,” that is to say, according to him, “an idiot and a maniac.”
And yet there was in this pity, which he implored so fervently only to insult it as soon as she had given it back to him, an enthusiastic, perhaps a slightly fanatical respect for his genius as an artist. That woman, whom he accused of being commonplace and lacking in intelligence, when he saw her working for his well-being with simple-hearted perseverance, was superbly artistic, in her love at least, since she accepted Laurent’s tyranny as a matter of divine right, and sacrificed to him her own pride, her own labor, and what another less self-sacrificing than she might have called her own glory.
And he, poor wretch, saw and understood that devotion, and when he realized his ingratitude he was consumed by remorse which crushed him. He should have had a heedless, robust mistress, who would have laughed at his anger and his repentance alike, who would not have suffered because of anything he did, so long as she controlled him. Thérèse was not such a woman. She was dying of weariness and disappointment, and Laurent, seeing her fade away, sought momentary forgetfulness of his own tears in the suicide of his intelligence, in the poison of drunkenness.