“Yes,” replied I. Alas! it was not the cold that I was shivering with.
At the end of the bridge some women pitied me because I was so young.
We reached the fatal quay. My sight and hearing grew dim once more; those voices, the heads at the windows, at the doors, in the shops, on the cross-bar of the lamp-posts, those eager and cruel spectators, those crowds who knew me, and amongst whom I knew no one, those lines of human faces——I was intoxicated, stupid, mad. So many eyes all fixed upon me became an unbearable torture.
I shook upon my seat, and paid no more attention to crucifix or priest.
In the tempest of sound that enfolded me I could no longer distinguish expressions of sympathy from jeers and insults; everything roared and resounded in my ears like the echo from a copper vessel.
Unconsciously I began to read the names over the shops. Once a feeling of morbid curiosity urged me to turn my head, and to look at what we were approaching.
It was the last bravado of the intellect—but the body would not obey it, for my neck remained stiff and obstinate.
I glanced to my left across the river; I could see one tower of Notre Dame, the other was hidden by it. It was the one upon which the flagstaff is. There was a great crowd upon it; they must have had a good view.
And the cart went on and on, and shop succeeded to shop, and the people laughed and stamped about in the mud; and I gazed calmly upon everything as people do in their dreams.
All of a sudden the row of shops upon which my eyes were fixed were cut by the corner of a square. The noise of the crowd became more sonorous, tumultuous, and merry. Suddenly the cart stopped, and I almost fell forwards.