Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs - Cosmopolitan University 2

"Three, four, five."
He mused.
"At what long intervals this clock strikes! how slowly! Six; seven!"
Then he remarked,--
"What a melancholy sound! Eight, nine! Ah! nothing can be more natural;
it's dull work for a clock to live in a prison. Ten! Besides, there is
the cemetery. This clock sounds the hour to the living, and eternity to
the dead. Eleven! Alas! to strike the hour to him who is not free is
also to chronicle an eternity. Twelve!"
He paused.
"Yes, it is midnight."
The clock struck a thirteenth stroke.
Ursus shuddered.
"Thirteen!"
Then followed a fourteenth; then a fifteenth.
"What can this mean?"
The strokes continued at long intervals. Ursus listened.
"It is not the striking of a clock; it is the bell Muta. No wonder I
said, 'How long it takes to strike midnight!' This clock does not
strike; it tolls. What fearful thing is about to take place?"
Formerly all prisons and all monasteries had a bell called Muta,
reserved for melancholy occasions. La Muta (the mute) was a bell which
struck very low, as if doing its best not to be heard.
Ursus had reached the corner which he had found so convenient for his
watch, and whence he had been able, during a great part of the day, to
keep his eye on the prison.
The strokes followed each other at lugubrious intervals.
A knell makes an ugly punctuation in space. It breaks the preoccupation
of the mind into funereal paragraphs. A knell, like a man's
death-rattle, notifies an agony. If in the houses about the
neighbourhood where a knell is tolled there are reveries straying in
doubt, its sound cuts them into rigid fragments. A vague reverie is a
sort of refuge. Some indefinable diffuseness in anguish allows now and
then a ray of hope to pierce through it. A knell is precise and
desolating. It concentrates this diffusion of thought, and precipitates
the vapours in which anxiety seeks to remain in suspense. A knell speaks
to each one in the sense of his own grief or of his own fear. Tragic
bell! it concerns you. It is a warning to you.
There is nothing so dreary as a monologue on which its cadence falls.