s, and her frank, gay
visage altered its expression and color as abruptly as though it had
passed from a ray of sunlight to a ray of moonlight; her eye became
humid; her mouth contracted, like that of a person on the point of
weeping. A moment later, she laid her finger on her lips, and made a
sign to Mahiette to draw near and look.

Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as though
approaching the bedside of a dying person.

It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented itself to
the eyes of the two women, as they gazed through the grating of the
Rat-Hole, neither stirring nor breathing.

The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched ceiling,
and viewed from within, it bore a considerable resemblance to the
interior of a huge bishop's mitre. On the bare flagstones which formed
the floor, in one corner, a woman was sitting, or rather, crouching. Her
chin rested on her knees, which her crossed arms pressed forcibly to
her breast. Thus doubled up, clad in a brown sack, which enveloped
her entirely in large folds, her long, gray hair pulled over in front,
falling over her face and along her legs nearly to her feet, she
presented, at the first glance, only a strange form outlined against the
dark background of the cell, a sort of dusky triangle, which the ray of
daylight falling through the opening, cut roughly into two shades, the
one sombre, the other illuminated. It was one of those spectres,
half light, half shadow, such as one beholds in dreams and in the
extraordinary work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching over a
tomb, or leaning against the grating of a prison cell.

It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor a definite
form; it was a figure, a sort of vision, in which the real and the
fantastic intersected each other, like darkness and day. It was with
difficulty that one distinguished, beneath her hair which spread to
the ground, a gaunt and severe profile; her dress barely allowed the
extremity of a bare foot to escape, which contracted on the hard, cold
pavement. The little of human form of which one caught a sight beneath
this envelope of mourning, caused a shudder.

That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted to the
flagstones, appeared to possess neither movement, nor thought, nor
breath. Lying, in January, in that thin, linen sack, lying on a granite
floor, without fire, in the gloom of a cell whose oblique air-hole
all