But they affronted death, came to it almost negligently, found
strength even to say banal or taunting things to those around them. He
recalled above all a boy of eighteen years old who had cowardly murdered
an old woman and two children in a back-country farm, and had walked to
his death without a tremor, talking reassuringly to the priest and the
police official, who walked almost sick with horror on either side of
him. Could he, then, not be as brave as that child?

They made him mount some steps and he felt that he had entered the
stuffy atmosphere of a closed room. Then someone removed the bandage.
He was in a room of sinister aspect and in the midst of a rather large
company.

Within these naked, neglected walls there were about thirty young men,
some of them apparently quite as young as Rouletabille, with candid blue
eyes and pale complexions. The others, older men, were of the physical
type of Christs, not the animated Christs of Occidental painters, but
those that are seen on the panels of the Byzantine school or fastened on
the ikons, sculptures of silver or gold. Their long hair, deeply parted
in the middle, fell upon their shoulders in curl-tipped golden masses.
Some leant against the wall, erect, and motionless. Others were seated
on the floor, their legs crossed. Most of them were in winter coats,
bought in the bazaars. But there were also men from the country, with
their skins of beasts, their sayons, their touloupes. One of them had
his legs laced about with cords and was shod with twined willow twigs.
The contrast afforded by various ones of these grave and attentive
figures showed that representatives from the entire revolutionary party
were present. At the back of the room, behind a table, three young men
were seated, and the oldest of them was not more than twenty-five and
had the benign beauty of Jesus on feast-days, canopied by consecrated
palms.

In the center of the room a small table stood, quite bare and without
any apparent purpose.

On the right was another table with paper, pens and ink-stands. It was
there that Rouletabille was conducted and asked to be seated. Then he
saw that another man was at his side, who was required to keep standing.
His face was pale and desperate, very drawn. His eyes burned somberly,
in spite of the panic that deformed his features Rouletabille recognized
one of the unintroduced friends whom Gounsovski had brought with him to
the supper at Krestowsky. Evidentl