VIII
The Penal Department of the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, so soon to become an institution where the youth of the nation were taught to fight for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity under the banner of the Second Republic of France,—the Penal Department was a central passage in the basement of the Instructors’ Building, with an iron-grated gate at either end, and a row of seven cool stone cells on either side, apartments favorable to salutary reflection, containing within a space of ten square feet a stool, and a window boarded to the upper panes.
In one of these Pupil 130, guilty of an offense of homicidal violence against the person of a schoolfellow, was subjected to cold storage, pending the Military Court Martial of Inquiry which would follow the sentence pronounced by the Civil Director-in-Chief of Studies. Pending both, the offender, deprived of his brass-handled hanger and the esteem of his instructors, nourished upon bread and water—Seine water in those unenlightened days, and Seine water but grudgingly dashed with the thin red vinegary ration-wine—had nothing to do but sit astraddle on the three-legged stool, gripping the wooden edge between his thighs, and remember—and remember....
And see, painted on the semi-obscurity of the dimly-lighted cell, de Moulny’s plume of drab-colored fair hair crowning the high, knobbed, reflective forehead; the stony-blue eyes looking watchfully, intolerantly, from their narrow eye-orbits; the heavy blockish nose; the pouting underlip; the long, obstinate, projecting chin; the ugly, powerful, attractive young face moving watchfully from side to side on the column of the muscular neck, in the hollow at the base of which the first light curly hairs began to grow and mass together, spreading downwards over the broad chest and fleshy pectorals in a luxuriance envied by other boys, for to them hirsuteness meant strength, and to be strong, for a man, meant everything....
He would hear de Moulny grunt as he lunged. He would straighten his own arm for the riposte—tread on that thrice-accursed slug: feel the thing squelch under his foot and slip: land in the ridiculous sitting posture, bump! upon those inhospitable paving-stones, shaken, inclined to laugh, but horribly conscious that the point of the foil he still mechanically gripped had entered human flesh....
That bulge of the big sallow body over the edge of the tightly-tied white silk handkerchief! Just there the steel had entered.... There was a little trickle of the dark red blood....
“That spoils my breakfast,” he would hear de Moulny say.... He would see him leaning forward with the forlorn schoolboy grin fixed upon his scarlet face.... And then—there would be the facial change, from painful red to ghastly bluish-yellow, and the limp heavy body would descend upon him, a crushing, overwhelming weight. The foil had broken under it.... Oh, God! And de Moulny would die.... And he, Hector Dunoisse, his friend, who loved him, as Jonathan, David, would be his murderer....
He leaped up in frenzy, oversetting the stool.... Came podgy Pédelaborde in the twenty-ninth hour of a confinement that seemed to the prisoner to have endured for weeks, in the character of one whose feet are beautiful upon the mountains. Undeterred by the fact that he possessed not the vestige of a voice, the dentist’s nephew had recourse to the method of communicating intelligence to one in durance vile, traditionally hit upon by the Sieur Blondel. A free translation of the lay is appended:
“You have not cooked his goose!
(Although at the first go-off it appeared uncommonly like it!)
They’ve plugged him up with tow—(I mean the surgeons)
If he does not inflame—(and the beggar is as cool as a cucumber and as strong as a drayhorse!)
He may possibly get over it.
So keep up your pecker!” sang Pédelaborde.
Upon the captive Cœur-de-Lion the song of the Troubadour could hardly have had a more tonic effect. Hector sang out joyfully in answer: