"Tiens, Duval, you grow too mad," he said angrily. "You and your beyond. What should there be?" "If there were,—Hell," muttered Duval, with shaking lips. Tinville banged the table. "Am I to have all the Salpêtrière here?" he shouted. "Have n’t we cut off enough priests’ heads yet? I tell you we have abolished Heaven, and Purgatory, and Hell, and all the rest of those child’s tales." A murmur of applause ran round. Duval’s hand went to his breast, and drew out a flask. He drank furtively, and leaned back again. Dangeau was moving away, but he turned for a moment, the old sparkle in his eyes. "My felicitations, Tinville," he observed with a casual air. "On what?" Dangeau smiled politely. "The convenience for you of having abolished Hell! It is a masterstroke. It only remains for me to wish you an early opportunity of verifying your statements." "Take him out," said Tinville, stamping his foot, and Dangeau went down the steps, and into the long adjoining room where the prisoners waited for the tumbrils. It was too much trouble now to take them back again to prison, so the Justice Hall was itself the ante-chamber of the guillotine. It was hot, and Dangeau felt the lassitude which succeeds a strain. Of what use to bandy words with Fouquier Tinville, of what use anything, since the last word lay with the strongest, and this hour was the hour of his death? It is very difficult for a strong man, with his youth still vigorous in every vein, to realise that for him hope and fear, joy and pain, struggle and endurance, are all at an end, and that the next step is that final one into the blind and unknown pathways of the infinite. He thought of Robespierre, out there in the tideway fighting for his life against the inexorable waves of Fate. Even now the water crept salt and sickly about his mouth. Well, if it drowned him, and swept France clean again, what did it matter if the swirl of the tide swept Dangeau from his foothold too? Absorbed in thought, he took no note of his companions in misfortune. There was a small crowd of them at the farther end of the room, a gendarme or two stood gossiping by, and there was a harsh clipping sound now and again, for the prisoners’ hair was a perquisite of the concierge’s wife, and it was cut off here, before they went to the scaffold.