The hope that had sustained him for years was gone; the prayer he had uttered by night and day, that once more he might hold his little child in his arms and cherish and succour her, was gone, too; they would never meet again. Let him go, therefore, to his doom unknown, and, so going, pass away and be forgotten. And it might be that, with him removed, God would see fit to temper to his child the adversity that had fallen to his own lot.
CHAPTER XXXI.
ST. GEORGES'S DOOM
The cours criminel on the banks of the Seine had been crowded all day, and the judges seated on the bench began to exhibit signs of fatigue at their labours. They had sat from ten o'clock in the morning far into the afternoon, and, now that four o'clock was at hand, it appeared as if their sitting would be still further prolonged; and this in spite of the number of cases they had disposed of.
A variety of malefactors, or so-called malefactors, had on that day received their sentences: some for professing the "reformed religion," as they blasphemously—in the judges' eyes—termed it; some for being bullies and cutthroats; a student aged sixteen had been sentenced to imprisonment in the Bastille for writing on the walls a distich on Louis, stating that he had displaced God in the minds of the French;[9] and a marchioness had been condemned to a fine of twenty pistoles and to remain out of Paris for a year for having poisoned her husband; also a spy, a Dutchman, supposed to be in the service of the accursed Stadtholder and English king, had been condemned to death by burning, his entrails to be first cut out and flung in his face; and several petty malefactors—a drunken priest who had read a portion of Rabelais to his flock instead of a sermon; a lampoonist who had written a joke on the De Maintenon; an actor who had struck a gentleman in defence of his own daughter; and a courtesan who had induced a young nobleman to spend too much money on her—were all sentenced to the Bastille, to Vincennes, and Bicêtre for various periods.
[9] The distich ran:
"La croix fait place au lis, et Jésus Christ au Roi
Louis, oh! race impie, est le seul Dieu chez toi."
For writing it the student remained in prison thirty-one years.
"Now," said Monsieur de Rennie, who presided to-day, when the last of these wretches had been finished off—"now, is the list cleared? We have sat six hours." And the other judges, one on either side of him, repeated his words and murmured, "Six hours!"