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Maurice immediately felt himself lifted up by powerful arms and carried a short distance. He heard a first door open, then a second. But the second was narrower than the first and the men carrying him could barely squeeze in with him. The murmuring and whispering continued.

“I’m sunk,” he said to himself. “They’ll put a stone around my neck and throw me into some hole in the Bièvre River.”

But after a short while he could feel that the men carrying him were going up some steps. A milder air struck his face and he was placed on a chair. Then he heard a door being shut and locked and footsteps receding and he sensed that he had been left on his own. He strained his ears the way a man does when his life hangs on a word, and he thought he heard the same voice that had already struck him with its mixture of hardness and softness say to the others:

“Let’s deliberate and take a vote.”

8

GENEVIÈVE

A quarter of an hour went by. It seemed like a century to Maurice. Which was only natural: young, handsome, vigorous, supported in his strength by a hundred devoted friends with whom he someday dreamed of doing great things, he suddenly felt himself, without warning, reduced to losing his life in a shameful ambush.

He knew he’d been locked up in some kind of room, but was the room being watched? As he made another attempt to get his hands free, his steely muscles pumped up and stiffened, but the rope cut into his flesh without breaking.

The worst of it was that his hands were tied behind his back, so he could not tear the blindfold off his eyes. If he could only see, perhaps he could get away. Yet his various efforts were being made without anyone objecting, without any movement near him. He deduced that he was alone.

He trod on something soft and yielding, sand or clay soil, perhaps. A penetrating acrid odor hit his nose, announcing the presence of vegetable matter. Maurice thought he might be in a greenhouse or something of that sort. He took a few steps, struck a wall, turned around to feel with his hands, felt plowing tools, and had to stifle a murmur of joy.

With stupendous effort, he managed to explore each instrument, one by one. His escape then became merely a matter of time: if only lady luck were to grant him five minutes and if among the tools he were to find some instrument with a cutting edge, he would be saved. He found a spade.

The way Maurice was tied up, it was quite a struggle to turn the spade upside down so that the metal blade was uppermost. Along the edge of the metal, which he held against the wall with his back, he cut or rather sawed through the rope that bound his wrists. The operation took some little time; the metal edge of the blade cut slowly. Sweat ran down his brow. He could hear someone coming. He gave one last violent, supreme, superhuman tug and the rope, already half worn through, snapped.

This time he could not suppress a cry of joy, sure as he now was of at least dying while defending himself.

Maurice tore the blindfold from his eyes and saw that he had not been mistaken. It wasn’t so much a hothouse he was in as a kind of pavilion where waxy plants too fragile to spend the winter out of doors were kept. In one corner were the gardening implements one of which had rendered him so great a service. Facing him was a window, which he dashed toward, but it had bars and there was a man armed with a rifle keeping guard outside.

On the far side of the garden, about thirty feet away, was a small pavilion matching the one Maurice was in. The shutters had been closed but a light shone through the slats.

He tiptoed to the door and listened; another watchman was pacing back and forth in front of the door. It was his steps he had heard.

But at the end of the hallway a jumble of voices sounded. The deliberations had clearly degenerated into an argument. Maurice couldn’t hear all of what was being said. But a few words did reach him, and among these words, as though for those words only the distance was