came, smelling for gold in every corner of his house; he studied the
cracks and crevices, he sounded the walls, he besought the trees of
the garden, the foundations of the house, the roofs of the turrets,
the earth and the heavens, to give him back his treasure. Often he
stood motionless for hours, casting his eyes on all sides, plunging
them into the void. Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the
powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and
obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought,
consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more
cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting
with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury,
--a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the
miseries of life and in those of death.

Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident
into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has,
like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.
But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of
neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his
treasure,--a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture.
Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of
his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that
already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his
untilled garden, absolutely motionless, and casting on those who
watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them
with terror. If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he
seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether
the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those
who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to
be in search of something lost.