"It is a little nervous disturbance, not alarming or surprising; such attacks may very likely recur from time to time." They did in fact recur, almost every day; and Pierre seemed to bring them on with a word, as if he had the clew to her strange and new disorder.

He would discern in her face a lucid interval of peace and with the willingness of a torturer would, with a word, revive the anguish that had been lulled for a moment.
But he, too, was suffering as cruelly as she.

It was dreadful pain to him that he could no longer love her nor respect her, that he must put her on the rack.

When he had laid bare the bleeding wound which he had opened in her woman's, her mother's heart, when he felt how wretched and desperate she was, he would go out alone, wander about the town, so torn by remorse, so broken by pity, so grieved to have thus hammered her with his scorn as her son, that he longed to fling himself into the sea and put an end to it all by drowning himself.
Ah! How gladly now would he have forgiven her.

But he could not, for he was incapable of forgetting.