The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 23

Chapter 23 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

Évariste Gamelin was weary, yet could find no rest; twenty times in the night he would start awake from a sleep haunted by nightmares. Only in the blue room, in Élodie’s arms, could he sleep for a few hours. He spoke and cried out in his sleep, waking her; but she could not make out his words.

One morning, after a night in which he had seen the Eumenides, he awoke shattered by terror and weak as a child. Dawn pierced the bedroom curtains with its livid arrows. Évariste’s hair, tangled across his brow, veiled his eyes in black; Élodie, seated at the head of the bed, gently brushed aside the wild locks. This time she gazed at him with a sister’s tenderness and, with her handkerchief, wiped the icy sweat from the unhappy man’s brow. Then he recalled that beautiful scene from Euripides’ Orestes, for which he had sketched a painting that, had he been able to finish it, would have been his masterpiece: the scene in which the unhappy Electra wipes away the foam that stains her brother’s mouth. And he seemed also to hear Élodie saying in a gentle voice: “Listen to me, my beloved brother, while the Furies leave you master of your reason…”

And he thought:

“And yet I am no parricide. On the contrary, it was out of filial piety that I shed the impure blood of my fatherland’s enemies.”