He had answered them, at the time, after his nature—that is to say, with servility while a thread of hope remained, and afterwards with loud scorn and venomous defiance. Brazen by constitution, he was not to reveal himself soft metal at the last. Trapped and at bay, he snarled like a tiger, confessing his yellow fangs at their longest. Hope might exist for other men; but he knew too well it was ended. He himself had stabbed it to death with a thousand wounds.
And yet he was racked with a sense of grievance.
And yet those words of the President tormented him.
He spoke, and wrote, and raged—throughout the brief interval of life which remained to him he was seldom still. But always the one sentence floated in letters of dim fire in the background of his mind. He had a mad feeling that if only once he could recall the necessary instance, he would be equipped with the means to defy his enemies—to defy heaven and hell and earth. That was a strange obsession for a sceptic and atheist, but it clung to him. The words, and the rebuke that they implied, were for ever in his brain, crossing its dark wastes like a shaft of light peopled with tiny travelling motes, which bore some relation, only in an insignificant form, to the tremendous business of the day, and yet seemed to have survived that business as its only realities. Thus through the texture of the ray came and went little absurd memories of a cut that juryman Vilate, a fellow-prisoner, had made upon his chin in shaving, of an early queen-wasp that had come and droned about the presidential desk during the droning indictment, of the face of an old shrewd, wintry hag which had peered out, white and momentary, from among the crowd of spectators, and had been as swiftly absorbed back into it.
The face! His wandering mind brought up on the recollection of it with an instant shock. The hate, the tumult, all other foam-white faces of the court, seemed in one moment to drop and seethe away from it like a spent wave, and to leave it flung up alone, stark, motionless, astounding.
* * * * *
At ten came the tumbrils, together with the prescriptive guard of sixty gendarmes to escort them to the scaffold. The ex-Public Prosecutor mounted to his place, dogged, baleful, heroic, according to his lights. He could not help bullying even his fellow-sufferers; but from the outset there was a strange, searching gleam in his eyes, which never left them until they were closed for ever.
From the Quai de l’Horloge came the first roar of the mob, as rabid to flesh its teeth in the accuser as it had ever been in the accused. Already, as the Pont Neuf was reached, a running, howling valetaille of blackguards and prostitutes was travelling with the procession. Lumbering onwards, between ranks of many-windowed houses alive with screaming faces and waving hands, the carts traversed the rues la Monoie and du Roule, and turned into the long stretch of the rue St. Honoré, which ended only at the bend into the great square of the guillotine.
They cursed him all the way; he cursed them back. The habit of his lips spat venom, while his brain ignored and his vision overlooked them.
“Where are thy batches now, Antoine?” they screamed.