id Damien,

'La journee sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my day also,
my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will have an end;
that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so long as I thought at
all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching when thinking in any shape
would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,
to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts
ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the
administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its
inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and
liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting
themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a
century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the
French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied to
those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to
approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself had
direct personal cognizance of various cases in which bribery had been
applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that perhaps
Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular passport
through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation been of
somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should have been
found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness of new-born
vigour, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular irritation it
excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one particular minister
new to the possession of power, anxious to distinguish himself, proud of
his creative functions within the range of his office, and very
sensitively jealous on the point of opposition to his mandates. Vain,
therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and,
in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some
of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not
think it prudent to proclaim my character beforehand as one who tampered
with such means, and thus to arm against myself those jealousies in
official people which it was so peculiarly important that I should keep
asleep.

All that day, however, I lingered about the avenues and vast courts in
the precincts of the prison,