to turn? To go on? To go back? What was the use? What was the use?... He
thought of giving himself up to a gendarme who went past him. He was
held back by an obscure instinct for life which bade him return to
Switzerland. There was no train in either direction for a few hours.
Christophe sat down in the waiting-room, could not keep still, left the
station, and blindly followed the road on through the night. He found
himself in the middle of a bare countryside--fields, broken here and
there with clumps of pines, the vanguard of a forest. He plunged into
it. He had hardly gone more than a few steps when he flung himself down
on the ground and cried:

"Olivier!"

He lay across the path and sobbed.

A long time afterwards a train whistling in the distance roused him and
made him get up. He tried to go back to the station, but took the wrong
road. He walked on all through the night. What did it matter to him
where he went? He went on walking to keep from thinking, walking,
walking, until he could not think, walking on in the hope that he might
fall dead. Ah! if only he might die!...

At dawn he found himself in a French village a long way from the
frontier. All night he had been walking away from it. He went into an
inn, ate a huge meal, set out once more, and walked on and on. During
the day he sank down in the middle of a field and lay there asleep until
the evening. When he woke up it was to face another night. His fury had
abated. He was left only with frightful grief that choked him. He
dragged himself to a farmhouse, and asked for a piece of bread and a
truss of straw for a bed. The farmer stared hard at him, cut him a slice