at you
should answer."

"But the question, Monsieur le President!" I thundered, my hand
outstretched towards Chatellerault. "Ask him--if you have any sense of
your duty--ask him am I not Marcel de Bardelys."

"Silence!" blazed the President back at me. "You shall not fool us any
longer, you nimble-witted liar!"

My head drooped. This coward had, indeed, shattered my last hope.

"Some day, monsieur," I said very quietly, "I promise you that your
behaviour and these gratuitous insults shall cost you your position.
Pray God they do not cost you also your head!"

My words they treated as one might treat the threats of a child. That
I should have had the temerity to utter them did but serve finally to
decide my doom, if, indeed, anything had been wanting.

With many epithets of opprobrium, such as are applied to malefactors
of the lowest degree, they passed sentence of death upon me, and with
drooping spirits, giving myself up for lost and assured that I should
be led to the block before many hours were sped, I permitted them to
reconduct me through the streets of Toulouse to my prison.

I could entertain you at length upon my sensations as I walked between
my guards, a man on the threshold of eternity, with hundreds of men and
women gaping at me--men and women who would live for years to gape upon
many another wretch in my position. The sun shone with a brilliance that
to such eyes as mine was a very mockery. Thus would it shine on through
centuries, and light many another unfortunate to the scaffold. The very
sky seemed pitiless in the intensity of its cobalt. Unfeeling I deemed
the note that everywhere was struck by man and Nature, so discordant was
it with my gloomy outlook. If you would have food for reflection upon
the evanescent quality of life, upon the nothingness of man, upon
the empty, heartless egoism implicit in human nature, get yourselves
sentenced to death, and then look around you. With such a force was all
this borne in upon me, and with such sufficiency, that after the first
pang was spent I went near to rejoicing that things were as they were,
and that I was to die, haply before sunset. It was become such a world
as did not seem worth a man's while to live in: a world of vainness, of
hollowness, of meanness, of nothing but illusions. The knowledge that I
was about to die, that I was about to quit all this, seemed to have
torn some veil from my eyes, and to have permitted me to recognize the
worthl