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'etat_ spoke to the
nation.

M. Emile Leroux, with his persistent parliamentary habits, nevertheless
attempted to insist.

"What!" said he, "can I not answer the signals which two of my colleagues
are making to me?"

"Two of your colleagues, indeed," answered the jailer, "they are two
thieves." And he shut the door, shouting with laughter.

They were, in fact, two thieves, between who