THE CITIZEN THÉODORE.
Night had enveloped in her gray mantle the immense hall, whose sad echoes had to repeat the severe words of the advocates and the suppliant ones of the pleaders.
From afar, in the midst of the obscurity, upright and immovable, a white column seemed watching, in the centre of the hall, like a phantom protector over the sacred place.
The only noise heard in this darkness was the nibbling and galloping of innumerable rats, which gnawed the papers enclosed in the writer's huts, after drilling their way through the wood.
Sometimes the sound of a carriage penetrated as far as this sanctuary of Themis (as an Academician would say), and the vague clanking of keys, which appeared to proceed from under the ground; but all this only reverberated in the distance, and nothing save these distant sounds ever broke the deep silence, or penetrated the thick darkness save the glimmering of some far remote light.
Certainly the man would be seized by bewildering terror who at this hour would have ventured into the vast hall of the Palace, the exterior of whose walls was yet stained with the blood of the victims of September; whose staircases this very day had witnessed the descent of twenty-five human beings condemned to an ignominious death, and were separated only by a few feet from the dungeons of the Conciergerie, peopled with bleached skeletons.
Nevertheless, in the middle of this frightful night, in the midst of this almost solemn silence, a low grating noise was heard; the door of a writer's hut turned upon its creaking hinges, and a shadow, darker than the shadow of night, glided cautiously out of the barrack.
Then the fierce patriot we have heard addressed as "sir," but who called himself Théodore, stepped lightly over the uneven stones. He held in his right hand a ponderous iron lever, and with his left felt that his double-barrelled pistol was secure in his belt.