“Play thy card, then, like a gambler!” said he.
“What!” I exclaimed in astonishment.
“Ah bah!” he growled; “didst thou think delicacy kept me from reading the message? But, fear not. Thou art too little a gudgeon for my playing”—and he swung open the door. Immediately the hiss and patter of voices swept upon me like rain. That, and the broad glare of daylight after so much darkness, confused me for a moment. The next I woke to the consciousness that at last my foot was on the precipice path—the gangway for the passage of the pre-damned into the Salle de la Liberté—the arête of the “Montagne,” it might be called, seeing how it served that extreme faction for a ridge most perilous to its enemies to walk on.
This gangway skirted a wooden barricade that cut the hall at about a third of its length. To my left, as I advanced, I caught glimpse over the partition of the dismal black plumes on the hats of the judges, as they bobbed in juxtaposition of evil under a canopy of green cloth. To my right, loosely filling the body of the hall, was the public; and here my extreme insignificance as a prisoner was negatively impressed upon me by the indifference of those whom I almost brushed in passing, for scarce a poissarde of them all deigned to notice the little gudgeon as he wriggled on the national hook. Then in a moment my conductor twisted me through an opening cut in the barricade, and I was delivered over to the Tribunal.
A certain drumming in my ears, a certain mist before my eyes, resolved themselves into a very set manner of attention. The stark, whitewashed walls seemed spotted with a plague of yellow faces—to my left a throng of mean blotches, the obsequious counsel for the defence; to my front the President and judges, in number three, like skulls decked with hearse-plumes; to my right the jury, a very Pandora-box of goblins, the lid left off, the evil countenances swarming over the edge. All seemed to my excited imagination to be faces and nothing else—drab, dirty, and malignant—ugly motes set against the staring white of the walls, dancing fantastically in the white day-beams that poured down from the high windows. Yet that I sought for most I could not at first distinguish,—not until the owner of it stood erect by a little table—placed to one side and a little forward of the judicial dais—over which he had been leaning. Then I recognised him instantly—Tinville, the Devil’s Advocate, the blood-boltered vampire—and from that moment he was the court to me, judge, jury, and counsel, and his dark face swam only in my vision like a gout of bile.
Now, I tell you, that so dramatic was this Assembly by reason of the deadliness of purpose that characterised it, that one, though a prisoner, almost resented the flippant coxcombry of the three sightless busts standing on brackets above the bench. For these—Brutus, Marat, St Fargeau (his gods quit the indignant Roman of responsibility for entertaining such company)—being jauntily decorated with a red bonnet apiece and a grimy cockade of the tricolour, jarred hopelessly in the context, and made of the bloodiest tragedy a mere clownish extravaganza. And, behold! of this extravaganza Fouquier-Tinville, when he gave reins to his humour, discovered himself to be the very Sannio—the rude powerful buffoon, with a wit only for indecency.
Yet he did not at a first glance figure altogether unprepossessing. Livid-skinned though he was, with a low forehead, which his hair, brushed back and stiffly hooked at its ends, seemed to claw about the middle like a black talon, there was yet little in his countenance that bespoke an active malignancy. His large eyes had that look of good-humoured weariness in them that, superficially, one is apt to associate with unvindictive long-sufferingness. His brows, black also and thick, were set in the habitual lift of suspense and inquiry. His whole expression was that of an anxious dwelling upon the prisoner’s words, lest the prisoner should incriminate himself; and it was only when one marked the tigerish steadiness of his gaze and the sooty projection of his under-lip over a strongly cleft chin that one realised how the humour of the man lay all upon the evil side. For the rest—as each detail of his personality was hammered into me by my pulses—his black clothes had accommodated themselves to his every ungainly habit of movement, his limp shirt was caught up about his neck with a cravat like a rag of dowlas, and over his shoulders hung a broad national ribbon ending in a silver medallion, with the one word Loi imprinted on it like a Judas kiss.
Thus the man, as he stood scrutinising me after an abstracted fashion, his left arm bent, the hand of it knuckled upon the table, the Lachesis thumb of it—flattened from long kneading of the yarn of life—striding over a form of indictment.
The atmosphere of the court was frowzy as that of a wine-shop in the early hours of morning. It repelled the freshness of the latter and communicated its influence to public and tribunal alike. Over all hung a slackness and a peevish unconcern as to business. Bench and bar yawned, and exchanged spiritless commonplaces of speech. True enough, a gudgeon was an indifferent fish with which to start the traffic of the day.
At length the Public Accuser slightly turned and nodded his head.