“Don’t be weary, m’ami—the good days will come again!”
And in this voice, still young, there was something piteous, almost maternal. Plainly this was the woman of the people with her courage under affliction and her dog-like devotion.
From the depths of the lobby, a voice replied, the voice of Pignou, wine-soaked, torn, burned with alcohol:
“Va donc! the good days—I’ll have them at the end of my five years.”
He knew his case well, that one!—
The guards cried: “Chut!—Keep quiet!”—But too late.
A door had opened, and the examining magistrate himself appeared on the sill.
Skull-cap of velvet, grizzled whiskers, mouth thin and evil, the eye scrutinizing, distrustful, but not profound, it was just the type of an examining magistrate, one of those men who thinks he has a criminal before him always, like those doctors of the insane who see maniacs everywhere. That one in particular had a certain way of looking at you, so annoying, and so insulting, that you felt guilty without having done anything. With one glance of the eye he terrified all the lobby: “What does all this noise mean?—Try to do your duty a little better,” he said, addressing the guards. Then he closed his door with a sharp click.