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He waited. What for? He watched. What for? Such inexorable doors, once
shut, do not re-open so soon. They are tongue-tied by their stagnation
in darkness, and move with difficulty, especially when they have to give
up a prisoner. Entrance is permitted. Exit is quite a different matter.
Ursus knew this. But waiting is a thing which we have not the power to
give up at our own will. We wait in our own despite. What we do
disengages an acquired force, which maintains its action when its object
has ceased, which keeps possession of us and holds us, and obliges us
for some time longer to continue that which has already lost its motive.
Hence the useless watch, the inert position that we have all held at
times, the loss of time which every thoughtful man gives mechanically to
that which has disappeared. None escapes this law. We become stubborn in
a sort of vague fury. We know not why we are in the place, but we remain
there. That which we have begun actively we continue passively, with an
exhausting tenacity from which we emerge overwhelmed. Ursus, though
differing from other men, was, as any other might have been, nailed to
his post by that species of conscious reverie into which we are plunged
by events all important to us, and in which we are impotent. He
scrutinized by turns those two black walls, now the high one, then the
low; sometimes the door near which the ladder to the gibbet stood, then
that surmounted by a death's head. It was as if he were caught in a
vice, composed of a prison and a cemetery. This shunned and unpopular
street was so deserted that he was unobserved.
At length he left the arch under which he had taken shelter, a kind of
chance sentry-box, in which he had acted the watchman, and departed with
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