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CHAPTER VII.
SHUDDERING.
When 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, that he had stepped over
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
shutting of the door had momentarily blinded him. The window in the door
had been closed as well. No loophole, no lamp. Such were the precautions
of old times. It was forbidden to light the entrance to the jails, so
that the newcomers should 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 adjusts itself slowly, enabled him to
distinguish a feature here and there, and the corridor was vaguely
sketched out before him.
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