He would go and sleep.
He argued thus: "Let me see: first to examine the facts; then I will recall all I know about him, his behaviour to my brother and to me.

I will seek out the causes which might have given rise to the preference.
He knew Jean from his birth?
Yes, but he had known me first.

If he had loved my mother silently, unselfishly, he would surely have chosen me, since it was through me, through my scarlet fever, that he became so intimate with my parents.

Logically, then, he ought to have preferred me, to have had a keener affection for me--unless it were that he felt an instinctive attraction and predilection for my brother as he watched him grow up." Then, with desperate tension of brain and of all the powers of his intellect, he strove to reconstitute from memory the image of this Marechal, to see him, to know him, to penetrate the man whom he had seen pass by him, indifferent to his heart during all those years in Paris.
But he perceived that the slight exertion of walking somewhat disturbed his ideas, dislocated their continuity, weakened their precision, clouded his recollection.

To enable him to look at the past and at unknown events with so keen an eye that nothing should escape it, he must be motionless in a vast and empty space.