In this situation an ex-Republican of the Eve, who had become a member of the majority, and on occasions sided somewhat with the Bonapartists, M. Emile Leroux, who had, moreover, been thrown into Mazas by mistake, having doubtless been taken for some other Leroux, began to weep with rage. Three, four, five hours thus passed away. In the meanwhile they had not eaten since the morning; some of them, in the excitement caused by the coup d'état had not even breakfasted. Hunger came upon them. Were they to be forgotten there? No; a bell rang in the prison, the grating of the door opened, and an arm held out to the prisoner a pewter porringer and a piece of bread.
The prisoner greedily seized the bread and the porringer. The bread was black and sticky; the porringer contained a sort of thick water, warm and reddish. Nothing can be compared to the smell of this "soup." As for the bread, it only smelt of mouldiness.
However great their hunger, most of the prisoners during the first moment threw down their bread on the floor, and emptied the porringer down the hole with the iron bars.
Nevertheless the stomach craved, the hours passed by, they picked up the bread, and ended by eating it. One prisoner went so far as to pick up the porringer and to attempt to wipe out the bottom with his bread, which he afterwards devoured. Subsequently, this prisoner, a Representative set at liberty in exile, described to me this dietary, and said to me, "A hungry stomach has no nose."
Meanwhile there was absolute solitude and profound silence. However, in the course of a few hours, M. Emile Leroux—he himself has told the fact to M. Versigny—heard on the other side of the wall on his right a sort of curious knocking, spaced out and intermittent at irregular intervals. He listened, and almost at the same moment on the other side of the wall to his left a similar rapping responded. M. Emile Leroux, enraptured—what a pleasure it was to hear a noise of some kind!—thought of his colleagues, prisoners like himself, and cried out in a tremendous voice, "Oh, oh! you are there also, you fellows!" He had scarcely uttered this sentence when the door of his cell was opened with a creaking of hinges and bolts; a man—the jailer—appeared in a great rage, and said to him,—
"Hold your tongue!"
The Representative of the People, somewhat bewildered, asked for an explanation.
"Hold your tongue," replied the jailer, "or I will pitch you into a dungeon."
This jailer spoke to the prisoner as the coup d'état spoke to the nation.
M. Emile Leroux, with his persistent parliamentary habits, nevertheless attempted to insist.