He, himself, imagined his soul to be
crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep,
to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed
with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui,
from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom.
His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole
saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought
of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he
experienced to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most
furious swearing could do no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of
silence--a sort of death to a southern temperament.
Great, therefore, was the sensation amongst the anciens militaires
frequenting a certain little cafe; full of flies when one stuffy
afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of
formidable curses.
He had been sitting quietly in his own privileged corner looking through
the Paris gazettes with just as much interest as a condemned man on the
eve of execution could be expected to show in the news of the day.
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