Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/118



HEN Gwynplaine heard the wicket shut, creaking in all its bolts, he trembled. It seemed to him that the door which had just closed was the communication between light and darkness,—opening on one side on the living, human crowd, and on the other on a dead world; and now that everything illumined by the sun was behind him, and he had overstepped the boundary of life, and was standing without it, his heart contracted. What were they going to do with him? What did it all mean? Where was he? He saw nothing around him; he found himself in perfect darkness. The closing of the door had momentarily blinded him. The window in the door had been closed as well. No loop-hole, no lamp. Such were the precautions of old times. It was forbidden to light the entrance to the jails, so that new-comers could take no observations. Gwynplaine extended his arms, and touched the wall on the right side and on the left. He was in a passage. Little by little a cavernous daylight, exuding, no one knows whence, and which floats about dark places, and to which the dilatation of the pupil slowly adjusts itself, enabled him to distinguish an object here and there, and the corridor became dimly visible before him.

Gwynplaine, who knew naught of penal severities, save through the exaggerations of Ursus, felt as though he had been seized by a sort of gigantic hand. To be caught in the mysterious toils of the law is frightful. He who is brave in all other dangers, is disconcerted in