recollection that the Chouan had taken an oath (and he knew that oaths
are held sacred with the Bretons) that he would keep his hand from his
knife unless he had clear evidence of treachery; such evidence existed,
but only in Dalibard's desk or the archives of Fouche. Tush, he was
safe! And so, when from dreams of fear he started at the depth of night,
so his bolder wife would whisper to him with firm, uncaressing lips:
"Olivier Dalibard, thou fearest the living: dost thou never fear the
dead? Thy dreams are haunted with a spectre. Why takes it not the
accusing shape of thy mouldering kinsman?" and Dalibard would answer, for
he was a philosopher in his cowardice: "Il n'y a que les morts qui ne
reviennent pas."

It is the notable convenience of us narrators to represent, by what is
called "soliloquy," the thoughts, the interior of the personages we
describe. And this is almost the master-work of the tale-teller,--that
is, if the soliloquy be really in words, what self-commune is in the dim
and tangled recesses of the human heart! But to this privilege we are
rarely admitted in the case of Olivier Dalibard, for he rarely communed
with himself. A sort of mental calculation, it is true, eternally went
on within him, like the wheels of a destiny; but it had become a
mechanical operation, seldom disturbed by that consciousness of thought,
with its struggles of fear and doubt, conscience and crime, which gives
its appalling interest to the soliloquy of tragedy. Amidst the
tremendous secrecy of that profound intellect, as at the bottom of a sea,
only monstrous images of terror, things of prey, stirred in cold-blooded
and devouring life; but into these deeps Olivier himself did not dive.
He did not face his own soul; his outer life and his inner life seemed
separate individualities, just as, in some complicated State, the social
machine goes on through all its numberless cycles of vice and dread,
whatever the acts of the government, which is the representative of the