His want of exercise, the want of air, and the bad and scanty nourishment had made him fall into a mortal anaemia; he coughed continually, suffering great oppression on his chest.

The knowledge he had acquired of the human body in his thirst for knowing everything did not admit of his being mistaken; he would die as poor Lucy had died.
After a year and a half of imprisonment he appeared before a council of war, mixed up with a mob of old men, women, and even quite young people, all weakened and broken by imprisonment, with their skin white and thick as chewed paper, and that dazed look in their eyes that comes from solitary confinement.

Gabriel hoped he would be executed.
When the fiscal came to the name of Luna on the long list he stopped an instant, shooting a ferocious glance at him--this man was among the theorists.

It appeared from the declarations of witnesses that he took no direct part in the deeds of violence, and that in his speeches he had always deprecated them; still it must be remembered that he was one of the principal propagandists of anarchism, and that he had delivered speeches in all the workmen's societies frequented by the authors of the attempts.
An elderly captain bent towards another member of the council, speaking in his ear, but Gabriel caught his words: "It is on these gentlemen who make speeches that we must lay our hand, so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or Ibsen, or any of those foreign worthies who advocate throwing bombs." Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison.
From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the fluctuations of his fate.

Sometimes he would gather that he and all his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy that they were all to be shot _en masse_.