“You! You!” he whispered. “You think you have me?–No, for I have one friend left.”
He slipped down by the door and lay there, thinking.
Often had he wondered quite how the end might come, and speculated how he would meet it; in these days a man would naturally consider a violent death as possible, especially if he meddled with affairs of government; but he had never considered that he would first be so cruelly broken and humbled.
He regretted that he had fled when Robespierre proscribed him; far better to have died then than like this.… But he closed his mind to the past, over which he wrote that one word–failure.
The hard bright philosophy of Voltaire, scorning mystery, cynical of any future state, was of little comfort now; his own book on the human spirit seemed very shallow in the recollection; these things were for life, not for death. Nothing helped now but courage. Just that one quality that would bring him safely into the unknown, the harbour to which he was now so swiftly bound.
He felt very weak and ill; he shivered continually, yet his blood was burning with fever; he dragged himself into a sitting posture, put his hand inside his miserable shirt and took from a cord round his heart–his one friend. A little package containing a phial–poison, bought in a cold dawn at a little druggist’s in Paris on that day when he had left the city for ever.
“I have suffered enough,” he said. “Enough.”
But he put the package back, for he thought that they meant to bring him food and a bed, and he would rather die on a bed, and he would rather ease the horrible burning of his cracked throat by a draught of water however stale and vile, before he composed himself to death.