lts and the harshest treatment. The officers perceived that
they had not to deal with a gentleman, and they treated him like a very
peasant.

At the end of half an hour or thereabouts, a clerk came to put an end to
his tortures, but not to his anxiety, by giving the order to conduct
M. Bonacieux to the Chamber of Examination. Ordinarily, prisoners were
interrogated in their cells; but they did not do so with M. Bonacieux.

Two guards attended the mercer who made him traverse a court and enter
a corridor in which were three sentinels, opened a door and pushed him
unceremoniously into a low room, where the only furniture was a table, a
chair, and a commissary. The commissary was seated in the chair, and was
writing at the table.

The two guards led the prisoner toward the table, and upon a sign from
the commissary drew back so far as to be unable to hear anything.

The commissary, who had till this time held his head down over his
papers, looked up to see what sort of person he had to do with. This
commissary was a man of very repulsive mien, with a pointed nose,
with yellow and salient cheek bones, with eyes small but keen and
penetrating, and an expression of countenance resembling at once the
polecat and the fox. His head, supported by a long and flexible neck,
issued from his large black robe, balancing itself with a motion very
much like that of the tortoise thrusting his head out of his shell. He
began by asking M. Bonacieux his name, age, condition, and abode.

The accused replied that his name was Jacques Michel Bonacieux, that he
was fifty-one years old, a retired mercer, and lived Rue des Fossoyeurs,
No. 14.

The commissary then, instead of continuing to interrogate him, made him
a long speech upon the danger there is for an obscure citizen to meddle
with public matters. He complicated this exordium by an exposition
in which he painted the power and the deeds of the cardinal, that
incomparable minister, that conqueror of past ministers, that example
for ministers to come--deeds and power which none could thwart with
impunity.

After this second part of his discourse, fixing his hawk's eye upon poor
Bonacieux, he bade him reflect upon the gravity of his situation.

The reflections of the mercer were already made; he cursed the instant
when M. Laporte formed the idea of marrying him to his goddaughter, and
particularly the moment when that goddaughter had been received as Lady
of the Linen to her Majesty.