The officer who had commanded the escort of militia charged to arrest Mary's son in the garden of Olives, approaching Caiphus, said to him: 'Seigneur, to conduct the Nazarene to Golgotha, the place of execution for criminals, we shall have to traverse the populous quarter of the Judicial gate; the calmness of the partizans of this rebel may be only apparent, and once arrived in the quarter of this vile populace, they may rise to release Jesus. I can answer for the courage of my brave soldiers; they have, already, this morning, after a deadly combat, put to flight an immense troop of determined vagabonds, commanded by a bandit named Banaias, who would have forced us to deliver up Jesus. Not one of those wretches escaped, despite their furious resistance.'
'The base liar!' said Genevieve to herself on hearing this bragging officer of militia, who continued:
'Still, Seigneur Caiphus, despite the proved courage of our militia, it would be prudent, perhaps, to confide the escort of the Nazarene to the place of execution, to the Roman guard.'
'I am of your opinion,' replied the high priest: 'I will go and ask one of the officers of Pilate to keep the Nazarene a prisoner in the guard room of the Roman cohorts until the hour of execution.'
Genevieve then saw, whilst the high priest went to converse with Pilate's officer, the chief of the militia approach Jesus; presently she heard this officer, replying probably to some words of the young man, say to him in a cruel and jesting tone: 'You are in a great hurry to stretch yourself on the cross. They must first make it, and it is not made in the twinkling of an eye. You ought to know this better than any one, in your quality of a former journeyman carpenter.'
One of the officers of Pontius Pilate, to whom the high priest had spoken, then came to Jesus and said to him: 'I am come to conduct you to the guard-room of our soldiers: when the cross is ready, they will bring it, and under our escort you shall start for Calvary! follow us!'
And Jesus, still bound, was conducted to a short distance off, by the militia, to the court where the Roman soldiers lodged; the door, before which paced a sentinel, being open, several persons who had, like Genevieve, followed the Nazarene remained outside to see what was about to happen.
When the young man was brought to the court of the guard-house (or prætorium), the Roman soldiers were scattered in different groups: some were cleaning their arms; others were playing at different games; some were practising with the lance under the inspection of an officer; others, extended on benches in the sun, were singing or conversing amongst themselves. She recognized, from their faces bronzed by the sun, from their martial and ferocious air, and the military order of their arms and clothes, those courageous, warlike, and merciless soldiers who had conquered the world, leaving behind them, as in Gaul, massacre, spoliation and slavery. The moment the soldiers heard the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and saw him brought in by one of their officers, they all left their occupations and hastened round him. Genevieve anticipated, on remarking the coarse and brutal manner of these soldiers, that Mary's son was about to suffer fresh outrages.
The slave remembered having read in the narratives left by the ancestors of her husband, Fergan, of the horrors committed by Cæsar's soldiers, the scourge of the Gauls, she did not doubt that these by whom the young man was surrounded, were equally as cruel as those of the past times. There was, in the middle of the court of the prætorium, a stone bench, on which the soldiers made Jesus sit down, still bound; then approaching him, they commenced insulting and railing at him.
'This, then, is the famous prophet!' said one.