The confession that I wished to write is written. To what end
could I add fresh facts to it now? I hoped to ease my heart by
passing in review all the details of this dark story, but I have
only revived the dread memory of the scenes in which I have been an
actor; from the first--when I saw my father stretched dead upon his
bed, and my mother weeping by his side, to the last--when I
noiselessly entered a room in which the unhappy woman was again
kneeling and weeping. Again upon the bed there lay a corpse, and
she rose as she had done before, and uttered the same despairing
cry: "My Andre--my son." And I had to answer her questions; I had
to invent for her a false conversation with my stepfather, to tell
her that I left him rather depressed, but with nothing in his
appearance or manner to indicate a fatal resolution. I had to take
the necessary steps to prevent this alleged suicide from getting
known, to see the commissary of police and the "doctor of the
dead." I had to preside at the funeral ceremonies, to receive the
guests and act as chief mourner. And always, always, he was
present to me, with the dagger in his breast, writing the lines
that had saved me, and looking at me, while his lips moved.
Ah, begone, begone, abhorred phantom! Yes! I have done it; yes! I
have killed you; yes! it was just. You know well that it was just.
Why are you still here now? Ah! I WILL live; I WILL forget. If I
could only cease to think of you for one day, only one day, just to
breathe, and walk, and see the sky, without your image returning to
haunt my poor head which is racked by this hallucination, and
troubled? My God! have pity on me. I did not ask for this
dreadful fate; it is Thou that hast sent it to me. Why dost Thou
punish me? Oh, my God, have pity on me! Miserere mei, Domine.
Vain prayers! Is there any God, any justice, is there either good
or evil? None, none, none, none! There is nothing but a pitiless
destiny which broods over the human race, iniquitous and blind,
distributing joy and grief at haphazard. A God who says, "Thou
shalt not kill," to him whose father has been killed? No, I don't
believe it. No, if hell were there before me, gaping open, I would
make answer: "I have done well," and I would not repent. I do not
repent. My remorse is not for having seized the weapon and struck
the blow, it is that I owe to him--to him--that infamous good
service which he did me--that I cannot to the present hour shake
from me the horrible gift I have received from that man. If I had
destroyed the paper, if I had gone and given myself up, if I had
appeared before a jury, revealing, proclaiming my deed, I should
not be ashamed; I could still hold up my head. What relief, what
joy it would be if I might cry aloud to all men that I killed him,
that he lied, and I lied, that it was I, I, who took the weapon and
plunged it into him! And yet, I ought not to suffer from having
accepted--no--endured the odious immunity. Was it from any motive
of cowardice that I acted thus? What was I afraid of? Of
torturing my mother, nothing more. Why, then, do I suffer this
unendurable anguish? Ah, it is she, it is my mother who, without
intending it, makes the dead so living to me, by her own despair.
She lives, shut up in the rooms where they lived together for
sixteen years; she has not allowed a single article of furniture to
be touched; she surrounds the man's accursed memory with the same
pious reverence that my aunt formerly lavished on my unhappy
father. I recognize the invincible influence of the dead in the
pallor of her cheeks, the wrinkles in her eyelids, the white
streaks in her hair. He disputes her with me from the darkness of
his coffin; he takes her from me, hour by hour, and I am powerless
against that love. If I were to tell her, as I would like to tell
her, all the truth, from the hideous crime which he committed, down
to the execution carried out by me, it is I whom she would hate,
for having killed him. She will grow old thus and I shall see her
weep, always, always-- What good is it to have done what I did,
since I have not killed him in her heart?