CITY OF PARIS,
ENTRANCE TO THE QUARRIES,
On the rough plaster, he saw a crowd assembled, and soldiers’ and custom-house officers’ uniforms, mingled with the shabby, dirty blouses of barracks-loafers. The old man instinctively approached. A customs officer, seated on the stone step below a round postern with iron bars, was talking with many gestures, as if he were acting out his narrative.
“He was where I am,” he said. “He had hanged himself sitting, by pulling with all his strength on the rope! It’s clear that he had made up his mind to die, for he had a razor in his pocket that he would have used in case the rope had broken.”
A voice in the crowd exclaimed: “Poor devil!” Then another, a tremulous voice, choking with emotion, asked timidly:
“Is it quite certain that he’s dead?”
Everybody looked at Planus and began to laugh.
“Well, here’s a greenhorn,” said the officer. “Don’t I tell you that he was all blue this morning, when we cut him down to take him to the chasseurs’ barracks!”
The barracks were not far away; and yet Sigismond Planus had the greatest difficulty in the world in dragging himself so far. In vain did he say to himself that suicides are of frequent occurrence in Paris, especially in those regions; that not a day passes that a dead body is not found somewhere along that line of fortifications, as upon the shores of a tempestuous sea,—he could not escape the terrible presentiment that had oppressed his heart since early morning.
“Ah! you have come to see the man that hanged himself,” said the quartermaster-sergeant at the door of the barracks. “See! there he is.”
The body had been laid on a table supported by trestles in a sort of shed. A cavalry cloak that had been thrown over it covered it from head to foot, and fell in the shroud-like folds which all draperies assume that come in contact with the rigidity of death. A group of officers and several soldiers in duck trousers were looking on at a distance, whispering as if in a church; and an assistant-surgeon was writing a report of the death on a high window-ledge. To him Sigismond spoke.