Arrived at Voûte du vautour, Villefaramir dragged himself along the corridors, half-bowed, often stumbling, as if the eyes no longer saw the way before his feet, guided solely by habit; he threw from his shoulders the magisterial toga, not for decency's sake, but because it was an overwhelming burden on the body and a torment on the mind worse than the embarrassment of Isildour when he went to the ball wearing an unfashionable ring; a tunic of Galadriella fecund of tortures†. With this in mind, he tripped on one of Mme. de Villefaramir's stiletto shoes, which had been sown by Thibaut with wild abandon during a visit of Omallé and the alley cats.
Villefaramir thought of his wife... and a red iron traversed his heart. Indeed, for an hour he had only had one face of his misery before the eyes, and voilà that tout à coup another offered itself to his mind, and no less terrible.
That woman, he had just condemned her to death as an inexorable judge, like Mandaux excluding the Noldaux from a ball to which even the Télérins had been invited; and she, stricken with terror, crushed with remorse, abysmed with the shame wherewith he had burthened her by the eloquence of his irreproachable virtue, she, a poor weak woman with no defense against an absolute and supreme power, she was perhaps at that very moment preparing herself for death!
† The tunic offered to Guimly by his mistress Galadriella had been drenched in poison by a jealous Celeborno, and caused the hero to die in abominable suffering.
