Am I going to die, yes or no?  Where can I be wounded?  I have managed to look at my hands, one by one; they are not dead, and I saw nothing in their dark trickling.  It is extraordinary to be made motionless like this, without knowing where or how.  I can do no more on earth than lift my eyes a little to the edge of the world where I have rolled.

Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying.  I see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating grass.  I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment—­I know him by the white in his mane—­rearing and whinnying like the true battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly unhappy are.  Once again, I recall the red deer’s little one, mutilated on its carpet of fresh crimson, and the emotion which I had not on that bygone day rises into my throat.  Animals are innocence incarnate.  This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life’s innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse.  My neck gives way, I utter a groan, and my face gropes upon the ground.

The animal’s start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearer still to the man who was talking.  He has unbent, and is lying on his back.  Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon’s pallor, and shows hideously that he is wounded in the neck.  I feel that he is going to die.  His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings.  He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, and some motionless portraits in the palaces—­the Escurial, Spain, Europe.  Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in his past:—­

“Begone, you dreamers!” he says, louder than the stormy sky where the flames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and the harrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yet continues to stone us.

He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:—­

“The truth is revolutionary,” gasps the nocturnal voice; “get you gone, you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strew words and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone!  You bring in the reign of men!  But the multitude hates you and mocks you!”

He laughs, as if he heard the multitude’s laughter.

And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely bigger in the plain’s black heart:—­

“Wot’s ‘e sayin’ now, that chap?”

“Let him be.  You can see ’e knows more’n ’e says.”

“Ah, la, la!”

I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and he says to me very quietly:—­

“I have confidence in the abyss of the people.”

And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood what he was saying!  A picture comes to life before my eyes—­that prince, whom I saw from below, once upon a time, in the nightmare of life, he who loved the blood of the chase.  Not far away a shell turns the darkness upside down; and it seems as if that explosion also has considered and shrieked.