As terrified as she, the two guards tied her hands and marched her off through the Street of the Hanged Man.
In times of great misery strange things bring us happiness; the thought of her condemnation to death lifted her like an aerial tide, because being with Germain went with it.
[CHAPTER LII]
THE SUPREME EXACTITUDE
Whoever passed within the walls of the Conciergerie was counted lost. Of the prisons of the Revolution, it was that to which the accused were transferred from the others on the eve of sentence; and underneath it was the hall of the pretended court infamous to all time as "the Tribunal of Blood." The fiacre containing Germain and the National Guards in whose charge Hache placed him, was followed by the mob to the doors, and at times it appeared as if he would certainly be torn away and hanged to a lantern rope. In front of the Conciergerie, whose portal was lit luridly by two torches, a delighted audience of Sans-culottes received his approach with clapping.
"Another!" they shouted.
And, as an arrest was brought in from the opposite direction just afterwards, they clapped again and repeated their shout of "Another!"
His guards dragged him into the presence of the concierge, who eyed him from his arm-chair with a drunken glance.
"Dungeon," he muttered.
With a banging of bolts and a creaking of doors, two turnkeys led Lecour down into a region of darkness. The turnkeys, like their chief, were surly sots. They took him along a low passage where mastiffs which patrolled it eyed him, threw back a cell door, thrust him in, and disappeared with their lanterns.