Then he lost all energy, relapsing beneath the weight of implacable
fatality that bound his limbs so as to more surely crush him.
In truth, he only found some relief when beating Therese, at night. This
brutality alone relieved him of his enervated anguish.
But his keenest suffering, both physical and moral, came from the bite
Camille had given him in the neck. At certain moments, he imagined that
this scar covered the whole of his body. If he came to forget the past,
he all at once fancied he felt a burning puncture, that recalled the
murder both to his frame and mind.
When under the influence of emotion, he could not stand before
a looking-glass without noticing this phenomenon which he had so
frequently remarked and which always terrified him; the blood flew to
his neck, purpling the scar, which then began to gnaw the skin.
This sort of wound that lived upon him, which became active, flushed,
and biting at the slightest trouble, frightened and tortured him. He
ended by believing that the teeth of the drowned man had planted an
insect there which was devouring him. The part of his neck where the
scar appeared, seemed to him to no longer belong to his body; it
was like foreign flesh that had been stuck in this place, a piece of
poisoned meat that was rotting his own muscles.
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