He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.
"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves.

Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire.

Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.
"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps.

The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and--in an awful silence--the incubi and succubi pass.
"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to the larva state and attack his lower parts.

He writhes, with the blood bursting his veins.