He staggered against the door and flung his weight against it. “You! You!” he whispered. “You think you have me?–No, for I have one friend left.” He slipped down by the door and lay there, thinking. Often had he wondered quite how the end might come, and speculated how he would meet it; in these days a man would naturally consider a violent death as possible, especially if he meddled with affairs of government; but he had never considered that he would first be so cruelly broken and humbled. He regretted that he had fled when Robespierre proscribed him; far better to have died then than like this.… But he closed his mind to the past, over which he wrote that one word–failure. The hard bright philosophy of Voltaire, scorning mystery, cynical of any future state, was of little comfort now; his own book on the human spirit seemed very shallow in the recollection; these things were for life, not for death. Nothing helped now but courage. Just that one quality that would bring him safely into the unknown, the harbour to which he was now so swiftly bound. He felt very weak and ill; he shivered continually, yet his blood was burning with fever; he dragged himself into a sitting posture, put his hand inside his miserable shirt and took from a cord round his heart–his one friend. A little package containing a phial–poison, bought in a cold dawn at a little druggist’s in Paris on that day when he had left the city for ever. “I have suffered enough,” he said. “Enough.” But he put the package back, for he thought that they meant to bring him food and a bed, and he would rather die on a bed, and he would rather ease the horrible burning of his cracked throat by a draught of water however stale and vile, before he composed himself to death. But the time crept on and no one came; there was not a sound without; it was obvious that they had forgotten him; the little light began to fade into Condorcet’s endless night. He rose to his full thin height and a huge disdain enveloped him; a quiet silence fell on his soul; he knew that he would never speak again; there was nothing left now that he could put into words. He went to the wall under the window where the damp oozed in a thin trickle and put his lips to it, moistening them. A little longer he waited, but no one came; his disdain grew; his disdain of all things as they were, as they must be, as they would always be; disdain of the world that had seized him, crushed him, reduced him with all that was fine and noble and far-reaching and splendid in him, to this ugly sordid end. He stooped and pulled up his stockings, fastening them as neatly as he could under the straps of his breeches; then he moved back and tried to see a star through the window; but darkness of masonry blocked his view; there was no sky visible. He opened the phial and drank. “Some one bungled when the world was made,” he thought.