“Let me be hurled into the bottomless pit,” he cried, “that so the Millennium may rise in the east like an August sun!”
“Now,” said I, “I will commune with my soul during the night, that perchance it may be revealed to me how the guillotine may guillotine itself.”
To my surprise the ridiculous bait took, and the poor wretch sunk down upon his straw and uttered no further word. Crossing the cell to come to my own heap, my foot struck against an iron ring that projected from a flag. For an instant a mad hope flamed up in me, only to as immediately die down. Was it probable that the “Mouse-trap”—into which, I knew, it was the custom to put newly arrived prisoners before their overhauling by the turnkeys and “scenting” by the dogs of the guard—would be furnished with a door of exit as of entrance? Nevertheless, I stooped and tugged at the ring to see what should be revealed in the lifting of the stone. It, the latter, seemed a ponderous slab. I raised one end of it a foot or so with difficulty, and, propping it with the pitcher, looked to see what was underneath. A shallow trough or excavation—that was all; probably a mere pit into which to sweep the scourings of the cell. Leaving it open, I flung myself down upon the mat of straw, and gave myself up to a melancholy ecstasy of reflection.
The maniac crouched in his corner. So long as the light lasted I was conscious of his eyes fixed in a steady bright stare upon the lifted stone. There seemed something in its position that fascinated him. Then, with a dropping splutter, the candle sank upon itself and was extinguished suddenly; and straightway we were embedded in a block of gloom.
Very soon I was asleep. Ease and sensation, drink and food—how strangely in those days one’s soul had learned to withdraw itself from its instinctive attachments; to hover apart, as it were, from that clumsy expression of its desires that is the body with its appetites; and to accept at last, as radically irreclaimable, that same body so grievously misinformed with animism. Now I could surrender to forgetfulness, and that with little effort, all the load of emotion and anxiety with which a savage destiny sought to overwhelm me. Nor did this argue a brutish insensibility on my part; but only a lifting of idealism to spheres that offered a more tranquil and serener field for meditation.
Once during the night a single drawn sound, like the pipe of wind in a keyhole, roused me to a half-recovery of my faculties. I had been dreaming of Carinne and of the little pig that fell into the pit, and, associating the phantom cry with the voluble ghosts of my brain, I smiled and fled again to the heights.
The noise of heavily grating bolts woke me at length to the iron realities of a day that might be my last on earth. I felt on my face the wind of the dungeon door as it was driven back.
“Follow me, Aubriot!” grunted an indifferent voice in the opening.
Lacking a response of any sort, the speaker, who had not even put himself to the trouble of entering the cell, cried out gutturally and ironically—
“Holà hé, holà hé, Citizen Aubriot Guillotin! thou art called to operate on thyself! Mordi, mordi, mordi! dost thou hear? thou art invited to commit suicide that France may regenerate itself of thee!”