The thin lips lifted in a snarl.
"That, my friend, was when you were higher in the world than you are now. Place of abode?"
Dangeau's gaze went past him. He shrugged his shoulders with a faintly whimsical effect.
"Shall we say the edges of the world?" he suggested.
Fouquier Tinville spat on the floor and leaned over the table with a yellow glitter in his eyes.
"How does it feel?" he sneered. "The edges of the world. Ma foi, how does it feel to look over them into annihilation?"
Dangeau returned his look with composure.
"I imagine you may soon have an opportunity of judging," he observed.
At Tinville's right hand a man sat drumming on the table. Now he looked up sharply, exhibiting a dead white face, where the lips hung loose, and the eyes showed wildly bloodshot.
"But if one could know first," he said in a shaking voice. "When one is so close and looks over, one should see more than others. I have asked so many what they saw. I asked Danton. He said 'The void.' Do you think it is that? As man to man now, Dangeau, do you think there is anything beyond or not?"