is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us
suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does
feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a
greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA
VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles
perhaps even more nastily in it than in L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA
VERITE. For through his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge
as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness
the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the
deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental
nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other
nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question
so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort
of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the
contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly
about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides
ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave
of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not
even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its
nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed
mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all,
everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down
to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of
itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting
itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings,
but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge
itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the
stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance,