“You also, citoyenne, will die to-morrow!” The decree, cold as the bloodless lips which uttered it, echoed in him to a savage satisfaction.
The girl remained motionless, head high, in superb indifference to his threat. The door behind her was flung open. The two ruffianly guards ran in, sprang to grip her arms in obedience to his imperious gesture. She smiled at him, splendid in unshakable disdain.
“We prefer to die!”
He motioned them out, livid with a rage beyond words. She went, proudly, unresistingly between her brutal captors. At the door she turned her head and smiled at him again, a smile full of significance.
“Canaille!”
He sat down to his table and, in a furious scrawl, added a name to his list.
... The vision dissolved in blackness, in an obliteration, for timeless moments, of all thought....
They found themselves looking into a long dark hall, its gloom inadequately relieved by high barred windows. Straw littered the floor and was collected into little heaps along the walls. Dimly discerned in the shadows was a throng of people, men and women—some promenading up and down in solitary dejection, some in groups seated upon the straw at a game of cards, some leaning propped against the wall in listless despair. He gazed into that Hades-like abode of misery with a curious anxiety at his heart, an anxiety whose cause for the moment eluded him. He watched, waiting in a vague expectation of some event that approached and was yet unseen.
A door in the foreground opened and, with a little intimate shock, he saw enter that mysterious duplication of his personality that was he and yet was not he—the sternly ascetic young répreséntant en mission whose plumed hat and sash of office proclaimed his authority in this dreadful place. A subservient turnkey followed at his heels, called a name.