Gwynplaine's sponsors touched his shoulder.
He turned round.
The folds of the great gilded door at the end of the gallery opened.
It was the door of the House of Lords.
Thirty-six hours only had elapsed since Gwynplaine, surrounded by a different procession, had entered the iron door of Southwark Jail.
What shadowy chimeras had passed, with terrible rapidity through his brain—chimeras which were hard facts; rapidity, which was a capture by assault!
CHAPTER II.
IMPARTIALITY.
The creation of an equality with the king, called Peerage, was, in barbarous epochs, a useful fiction. This rudimentary political expedient produced in France and England different results. In France, the peer was a mock king; in England, a real prince—less grand than in France, but more genuine: we might say less, but worse.