But the time crept on and no one came; there was not a sound without; it was obvious that they had forgotten him; the little light began to fade into Condorcet’s endless night.
He rose to his full thin height and a huge disdain enveloped him; a quiet silence fell on his soul; he knew that he would never speak again; there was nothing left now that he could put into words.
He went to the wall under the window where the damp oozed in a thin trickle and put his lips to it, moistening them.
A little longer he waited, but no one came; his disdain grew; his disdain of all things as they were, as they must be, as they would always be; disdain of the world that had seized him, crushed him, reduced him with all that was fine and noble and far-reaching and splendid in him, to this ugly sordid end.
He stooped and pulled up his stockings, fastening them as neatly as he could under the straps of his breeches; then he moved back and tried to see a star through the window; but darkness of masonry blocked his view; there was no sky visible.
He opened the phial and drank.
“Some one bungled when the world was made,” he thought.
He lay down along the floor and closed his eyes; and presently he spread his arms out in the form of a cross. And presently it grew completely dark in the cell.