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1467 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1936
“He told me he didn’t worry; in fact he said he was happy, that he likes being there.” Provoked by his father’s chuckle of self-satisfaction, Antoine added in a cutting tone: “The poor boy has such memories of family life that even prison life strikes him as more agreeable.”
The insult missed its mark.
In attitudes of grief, like two mourning dark-robed figures on an ancient vase, the nuns were stationed on either hand of the dead man, whose statue-like repose lent a real grandeur to the scene, for all its artifice. That man had been Oscar Thibault, a master of men. Now that proud voice was stilled, all that power reduced to impotence. Antoine hardly dared to make a gesture, break the silence.
Jacques felt a rush of hatred stirring within him. Thus he had always been; even in childhood there had always smouldered deep in his heart a secret fire of anger – like the molten core, he pictured it, that seethes in the bowels of the earth – and now and again from that fiery underworld of rancour there would surge a jet of red-hot lava that nothing could hold back.