But, although these historical conjectures have some foundation so far as the inaction of Louis XI. is concerned, it is not so as regards Cornelius Hoogworst. There was no inaction there. The silversmith spent the first days which succeeded that fatal night in ceaseless occupation. Like carnivorous animals confined in cages, he went and came, smelling for gold in every corner of his house; he studied the cracks and crevices, he sounded the walls, he besought the trees of the garden, the foundations of the house, the roofs of the turrets, the earth and the heavens, to give him back his treasure. Often he stood motionless for hours, casting his eyes on all sides, plunging them into the void. Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury, --a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the miseries of life and in those of death.
Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has, like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.
But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his treasure,--a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture.