“Did you hear?” said a woman with a handkerchief over her head; “did you hear? He began by saying the young man did right in cutting the rope, and still he has arrested him all the same.”
“Just as though he was obliged to go!”
A quarter of an hour later, a physician hurried through the crowd, crying,—
“Where is the patient?”
The unfortunate shopkeeper was in one corner, studying how he could possess himself of the thousand francs without letting his wife know it, while she had followed the commissary, hoping to get the money without the knowledge of her husband.
CHAPTER V.
At the door of the commissary’s office, the clerk politely begged Eusebe to enter first, introducing him into a room divided into two parts by a screen of green lustring. The dilapidated walls were covered with black designs executed by offenders, who had whiled away the tedium of waiting by cultivating the fine arts. The rays of the sun, struggling to enter at a window that looked into the court, shone feebly on an old black desk, upon which a quantity of stamped papers, that seemed to have the jaundice, were lying. Two clerks, whose appearance was in keeping with the place, were scribbling away mechanically. Eusebe, who thought the adjective shabby the proper word with which to qualify the ensemble, said to the clerk,—
“Is this, sir, what is called the formidable appareil of the courts of justice?”