"Then let some one eat his nose, and put a stop to this!" added Barbillon.
"Just now, Skeleton was for giving a stab to this spy Germain."
The provost took his pipe for a moment from his mouth, and said, in a voice so low, so crapulously hoarse, that he could scarcely be heard, "Germain holds up his head; he is a spy; he troubles us: for the less one talks, the more one listens. We must make him clear out of the Lions' Den. Once we make him bleed, they will take him from here."
"Well, then," said Nicholas, "what change is that?"
"There is this change," replied Skeleton, "that if he has sold us, as Big
Cripple says, he shall not escape with a small bleeding."
"Very good," said Barbillon.
"There must be an example," said Skeleton, becoming more animated. "Now it is no longer the grabs who find us out: it is the spies. Jacques and Gauthier guillotined the other day. Roussillon, sent to the galleys for life, sold!"
"And me, and my mother, and Calabash, and my brother at Toulon!" cried Nicholas, "have we not been sold by Bras-Rouge? That is certain now, since, instead of putting him here, they have sent him to La Roquette! They did not dare leave him with us; he knew his treachery, the sneak!"
"And," said Barbillon, "has not Bras-Rouge also sold me?"
"And me," said a young prisoner, in a shrill and reedy voice, lisping in an affected manner, "I was betrayed by Jobert, a man who proposed an affair in the Rue Saint Martin."
This last personage, with the reedy voice, a pale, fat, and effeminate face, and an insidious and cowardly expression, was dressed in a singular manner. He had on his head a red handkerchief, which allowed two locks of white hair to be seen plastered on his temples; the ends of the handkerchief formed a bow over his forehead; he wore, for a cravat, a shawl, of white merino with green palms in the corners on his bosom; his jacket, of maroon colored cloth, disappeared under the tight waistband of his ample trousers, made of gay Scotch plaid.