“I say that we shall see about that. Let us enter.”
Balsamo followed him without shrinking into the amphitheatre, on Hautefeuille Street. On a marble slab in the long, narrow hall were two corpses, a man’s and a woman’s. She had died young: he was old and bald; a wornout sheet veiled their bodies but half exposed their faces.
Side by side on the chilly bed, they might never have met in life and if their souls could see them now, they would have been mutually surprised at the neighborhood.
Marat pulled off the shroud of coarse linen from the two unfortunates equalised by death under the surgeon’s knife. They were nude.
“Is not the sight repugnant to you?” asked Marat with his usual braggadocia.
“It makes me sad,” replied the other.
“From not being habituated to it,” said the dissector. “I see the thing daily and I feel neither sadness nor dislike. We surgical practitioners have to live with the lifeless and we do not on their account interrupt any of the functions of our life.”
“It is a sad privilege of your profession.”
“And why should I feel in the matter? Against sadness, I have reflection; against the other thing, habit. What is to frighten me in a corpse, a statue of flesh instead of stone?”
“As you say, in a corpse there is nothing, while in the living body there is—— ”