"Once more, be still--not that name--not that name!"
"Yes, yes! may the thunder blast her who bears that name! It is she who has ruined all. Our heads would now be in security on our shoulders but for your silly love for this creature."
Instead of storming with rage, Jacques Ferrand answered with a deep sigh, "Do you know this woman? Speak. Have you ever seen her?"
"Beautiful!" answered the notary, shrugging his shoulders. "Hold!" he added with a kind of bitter desperation; "be still! Do not speak of what you do not know. Do not accuse me! What I have done you would have done in my place."
"I place my life at the mercy of a woman!"
"Of that one--yes--and I would do it again."
"By Jove, he is still under the charm," cried Polidori amazed.
"Listen," answered the notary, in a low, calm voice, "listen: you know if I love gold? You know what I have braved to acquire it? To reckon up the sums I possessed, to see them doubled by my avarice, to endure every privation, and know myself the master of a treasure--it was my joy, my happiness. Yes, to possess, not to enjoy, but to theorize, was my life. One month since, if they had said to me, 'Between your fortune and your head choose,' I would have given up my head."
"But of what use to have money when one dies?"
"Ask me, then, 'Of what use to possess it, when one makes no use of what one possesses?' I, a millionaire, did I lead the life of a millionaire? No: I lived like a poor beggar. I loved, then, to possess, for possession's sake."
"But once more I ask you, of what use is it when one dies?"
"To the possessing! Yes, to enjoy that even to the last moment for which you have braved privations, infamy, the scaffold; yes, to say once more, the head under the ax, 'I possess!' Oh! do you see, death is sweet compared to the torments that are endured on seeing one's self during life dispossessed, as I am, of all that I have amassed at the price of so much pain, so much danger! Oh! to say, at each moment of the day, 'I, who had more than a million--I, who have endured every privation to preserve it--I, who in ten years would have doubled it, tripled it--I have no longer anything. It is cruel! it is to die, not each day, but each moment of the day. Yes, to this horrible agony, which may endure for years, perhaps, I would have preferred death a thousand times. Once more, I could have said in dying, 'I possess.'"