The maniac crouched in his corner. So long as the light lasted I was conscious of his eyes fixed in a steady bright stare upon the lifted stone. There seemed something in its position that fascinated him. Then, with a dropping splutter, the candle sank upon itself and was extinguished suddenly; and straightway we were embedded in a block of gloom. Very soon I was asleep. Ease and sensation, drink and food--how strangely in those days one’s soul had learned to withdraw itself from its instinctive attachments; to hover apart, as it were, from that clumsy expression of its desires that is the body with its appetites; and to accept at last, as radically irreclaimable, that same body so grievously misinformed with animism. Now I could surrender to forgetfulness, and that with little effort, all the load of emotion and anxiety with which a savage destiny sought to overwhelm me. Nor did this argue a brutish insensibility on my part; but only a lifting of idealism to spheres that offered a more tranquil and serener field for meditation. Once during the night a single drawn sound, like the pipe of wind in a keyhole, roused me to a half-recovery of my faculties. I had been dreaming of Carinne and of the little pig that fell into the pit, and, associating the phantom cry with the voluble ghosts of my brain, I smiled and fled again to the heights. The noise of heavily grating bolts woke me at length to the iron realities of a day that might be my last on earth. I felt on my face the wind of the dungeon door as it was driven back. “Follow me, Aubriot!” grunted an indifferent voice in the opening. Lacking a response of any sort, the speaker, who had not even put himself to the trouble of entering the cell, cried out gutturally and ironically-- “_Holà hé, holà hé_, Citizen Aubriot Guillotin! thou art called to operate on thyself! _Mordi, mordi, mordi!_ dost thou hear? thou art invited to commit suicide that France may regenerate itself of thee!” I raised my head. A burly form, topped by a great hairy face, blocked the doorway. I made it out by the little light that filtered through a high-up grating above me. “_Mille démons!_” shouted the turnkey suddenly, “what is this?” He came pounding into the cell, paused, and lifted his hands like a benedictory priest. “_Mille démons!_” he whispered again, with his jaw dropped. I had jumped to my feet. “_Pardieu!_ Mr Jailer!” said I; “the guillotine, it appears, has anticipated upon itself that law of which it is the final expression. The rest of us you will of necessity acquit.” I looked down, half-dazed; but I recalled the odd sound that had awakened me in the night. Here, then, was the explanation of it--in this swollen and collapsed form, whose head, it seemed, was plunged beneath the floor, as if it had dived for Tartarus and had stuck at the shoulders. “He has guillotined himself with a vengeance!” I exclaimed. “But how?” said the turnkey, stupidly.