Chapter 167

chapter 167 A man who had lost the will to live, a hopeless and despairing creature, the victim of every conceivable malady and misfortune, lay in a dim room of a large villa. From the basement where he was kept, he could not be seen. The ground floor had a window high above him; it looked into an interior room. But there was nothing visible on the window's sill, nothing but a net which, as it shifted with the light breeze, showed what had passed through there during the night. The room was bare and lifeless. A bed, an iron bedstead, the bedstead broken, lay on the floor. Some ointments and medicines lay scattered about, which would have long since expired. A pitcher and a basin stood next to the bed. Nothing else. He'd have given up, he had have ended his own life, he'd have hung himself by his feet from the beam of the house if he had not been prevented from doing so by the intervention of the people who was keeping him prisoner there. He so wanted to