“Par exemple! you grow a little rusty, perhaps, for a notable actor. It is well, then, that you have an engagement at last.”
“To perform? And where, M. Cabochon?”
“In the Palais de Justice. That is a theatre with a fine box, citizen; and the verdict of those that sit in it is generally favourable—to the public.”
CHAPTER XII.
THE MOUSE-TRAP.
Was I so very small? I had the honour of a tumbril all to myself on my journey to the Conciergerie, and I swear that I could have thought I filled it. But Mademoiselle de Lâge was the pretty white heifer that had caused me to puff out my sides in emulation of her large nobility—me, yes, of whom she would have said, as the bull of the frog, “Il n’était pas gros en tout comme un œuf.” Now I was travelling probably to my grave; yet the exaltation of that interview still dwelt with me, and I thought often of some words that had once been uttered by a certain Casimir Bertrand: “To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back! What could kings wish for better?”
We came down upon the sullen prison by way of the Pont au Change and the Quay d’Horloge, and drew up at a door on the river-side. I saw a couple of turrets, with nightcap roofs, stretch themselves, as if yawning, above me. I saw in a wide angle of the gloomy block of buildings, where the bridge discharged itself upon the quay, a vast heap of newly thrown-up soil where some excavations were being conducted; and from the mound a sort of crane or scaffold, sinisterly suggestive of a guillotine surmounting a trench dug for its dead, stood out against a falling crimson sky. The river hummed in its course; above a green spot on the embankment wall a cloud of dancing midges seemed to boil upwards like steam from a caldron. Everything suggested to me the mise en scène of a rehearsing tragedy, and then promptly I was haled, like an inanimate “property,” into the under-stage of that dark “theatre of varieties.”
Messieurs the jailers, it appeared, were at their supper, and would not for the moment be bothered with me. A gush of light and a violent voice issued from a door to one side of a stony vestibule: “Run the rascal into La Souricière, and be damned to him!”
Thereat I was hurried, by the “blue” that was responsible for my transfer, and an understrapper with the keys, by way of a gloomy course—up and down—through doorways clinched with monstrous bolts—under vaulted stone roofs where spiders, blinded by the lamp glare, shrank back into crevices, and where all the mildew of desolation sprouted in a poisonous fungus—along passages deeply quarried, it seemed, into the very foundations of despair; and at last they stopped, thrust me forward, and a door clapped to behind me with a slam of thunder.
I stood a moment where I was and caught at my bewildered faculties. It took me, indeed, but a moment to possess myself of them. In those days one had acquired a habit of wearing one’s wits unsheathed in one’s belt. Then I fell to admiring the quite unwonted brilliancy of the illumination that pervaded the cell. It was a particularly small chamber—perhaps ten feet by eight or so—and consequently the single lighted candle, held in a cleft stick the butt of which was thrust into a chink in the stones, irradiated it to its uttermost corner. The furniture was artless in its simplicity—a tub, a broken pitcher of water, and two heaps of foul straw. But so abominable a stench filled the place that no doubt there was room for little else.
Now, from one of the straw beds, the figure of a man—my sole comrade to be, it would appear—rose up as I stirred, and stood with its back and the palms of its hands pressed against the wall. Remaining thus motionless, the shadows blue in its gaunt cheeks, and little husks of wheat caught in its dusty hair, it fixed me with eyes like staring pebbles.