Some minutes later, the messenger returned to his post, prepared to inform the importunate young man that he could not possibly be received by Justice Hubert. He stopped short on the threshold: not a soul was to be seen!
"Wherever has that young man got to? Taken himself off, most likely!... I expect he was one of those lawyer's clerks—confound them! A nice fool I should have looked if his Honour, Justice Hubert, had said he would receive him!"
With this reflection the messenger went back to his newspaper, not without having ascertained that it was four o'clock, and therefore he had still an hour to wait before he could have his coffee and cigar at the "Men of the Robe."
Through the great windows of the Court of Assizes, carefully closed as they were, not a ray of moonlight filtered into the court room. And this obscurity lent an added terror to a silence as profound as the grave, a silence which, with the falling shades of night, assumed possession of the vast hall, where so many criminals had listened to the fatal sentence—the sentence of death.
When the Court had risen, the assistants had, as usual, proceeded to put the place in order; then the police sergeant had made his rounds, and had gone away, double locking the doors behind him. After this the chamber had gradually sunk into complete repose: a repose which would be broken the following morning when the bustling routine of the legal day commenced once more.
Little by little, too, the many and varied noises, which had echoed and re-echoed the whole day through in the galleries of the Palais de Justice, had died down, and sunk into silence.
The custodians had made their last round; the barristers had quitted the robing-room; the poor wretches who had slunk in to warm themselves at the heating apparatus in the halls had shuffled back to the cold street, and the whistling blasts of the north wind. The immense pile was entirely deserted.
A clock began to strike.