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...