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Updated: May 2, 2025
They were advised by various parts of the room in divers tongues to dream of their wives, to be careful of themselves in bed, to avoid catching cold, and to attend to a number of personal wants before retiring. The symphony gradually collapsed, leaving me sitting in a state of complete wonderment, dead tired and very happy, upon my paillasse.
And he is intensely religious, religious with a terrible and exceedingly beautiful and absurd intensity ... every Friday he will be found sitting on a little kind of stool by his paillasse reading his prayer-book upside down; turning with enormous delicacy the thin difficult leaves, smiling to himself as he sees and does not read.
Nay! at this very moment she was conscious of a wild passionate desire for death.... In this sudden onrush of memory and of thought she wished with all her soul and heart and mind to die here suddenly, on this hard paillasse, in this lonely and dark prison... so that she should be out of the way once and for all... so that she should NOT be the hostage to be bartered against his precious life and freedom.
Let me say at once that, so terrible an impression did the members make, each inhabitant of The Enormous Room rushed at break-neck speed to his paillasse; where he stood at bay, assuming as frightening an attitude as possible. The Enormous Room was full enough already, in all conscience.
It seemed a terrible effort to co-ordinate all these things, and to try and realize what the room was, and what was the meaning of the paillasse, the narrow window and the stained walls, too much altogether for the aching head to take in save very slowly, very gradually. Marguerite was content to wait and to let memory creep back as reluctantly as it would.
"Oui, Oui, Oui, Assez!" And Bill The Hollander hugely turned to The Zulu, stepping accurately to the paillasse of that individual, and demanded "And you, you Gottverdummer Polaker, do you want t' fight?" at which The Zulu gently waved in recognition of the compliment and delicately and hastily replied, between slow puffs "Mog."
But this old man seemed so feeble and so helpless, his very delicacy of thought as he built up a screen to divide the squalid room in two, proved him to be singularly inefficient for the task of a watchful jailer. When the four chairs appeared fairly steady, and in comparatively little danger of toppling, he dragged the paillasse forward and propped it up against the chairs.
He was laid upon a paltry paillasse in that gallery where everybody went in and out at pleasure; and in that wretched place, after a lapse of nine hours, expired "he," says Commynes, "who had so many fine houses, and who was making so fine an one at Amboise; so small a matter is our miserable life, which giveth us so much trouble for the things of the world, and kings cannot help themselves any more than peasants.
The words: "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite ou la Mort!" stared out at her from somewhere beyond those active molecules of dust, but she also saw just above the other paillasse the vague outline of a dark crucifix.
She tried to raise herself still further and found the process astonishingly easy. Her limbs still ached and the violent, intermittent pain in her head certainly made her feel sick and giddy at times, but otherwise she was not ill. She sat up on the paillasse, then put her feet to the ground and presently walked up to the improvised dressing-room and bathed her face and hands.
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