feeling decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this
secretive carnage; where were these extravagant amputations going
to stop? First one head was hacked off, and then another; in this
case (he told himself bitterly) it was not true that two heads
were better than one. As he crossed the study he almost staggered
at a shocking coincidence. Upon Valentin's table lay the coloured
picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of
Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a
Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed
one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing
features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical
of some note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of
chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great
brutality of the intellect which belongs only to France. He felt
Paris as a whole, from the grotesques on the Gothic churches to
the gross caricatures in the newspapers. He remembered the
gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw the whole city as one
ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin's table
up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great
devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot
from under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of
morning. Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at
the upper end of a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the
mortal remains, looking enormous in the twilight. The big black
figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted
them essentially unchanged. The second head, which had been
fished from among the river reeds that morning, lay streaming and
dripping beside it; Valentin's men were still seeking to recover