“How long can I keep upright? How long can I walk?”
He tried to snatch at old mathematical problems, to soothe and calm and distract himself with that; he saw the figures range themselves before him–but they were of fire, gigantic and flaming.
He thought that the trees had caught fire from the unsupportable sky, that the hedgerows were singeing and smoking, that the road was rising up before him in a column of white fire; that all this fiery world was advancing on him; everything was scarlet, and there was a sound in his ears like the beating of many drums.
“He will fall,” said the official on horseback, fanning himself with his hat.
Condorcet heard the words, he saw them written before him in the same acrid scarlet that was colouring the world. He tried to protest, to draw himself erect, for he had heard them laughing; but he felt his strength breaking like brittle dry straws; he fell head first as they had meant him to fall, as he had dreaded to fall, and his mouth filled with dust.
When they saw that he was indeed unconscious and that no blows nor kicks could induce him to rise, they lifted him up and dragged him between them to Bourg-la-Reine. As they entered the town he recovered consciousness enough to know that his martyrdom was complete and that he was the object of all the town idlers’ ridicule as he was drawn along, ragged, bloody, with a distorted face, between two of his peasant guards.
They brought him to the prison, an old building in bad repair; his head hung down on his breast, shaking from side to side. The soldiers and jailers greeted him and his escort with amusement.
“What have we here?”
“A philosopher citizen–an aristocrat citizen. In here, citizen, and consider this same philosophy of yours!”
They thrust him into a cell several feet below the ground; the foul damp of it hung close round walls and roof.