ease the chamber to
condemn my client to the fine?"

"An abrogated text," said the advocate extraordinary of the king.

"Nego, I deny it," replied the advocate.

"Put it to the vote!" said one of the councillors; "the crime is
manifest, and it is late."

They proceeded to take a vote without leaving the room. The judges
signified their assent without giving their reasons, they were in a
hurry. Their capped heads were seen uncovering one after the other, in
the gloom, at the lugubrious question addressed to them by the president
in a low voice. The poor accused had the appearance of looking at them,
but her troubled eye no longer saw.

Then the clerk began to write; then he handed a long parch-ment to the
president.

Then the unhappy girl heard the people moving, the pikes clashing, and a
freezing voice saying to her,--"Bohemian wench, on the day when it shall
seem good to our lord the king, at the hour of noon, you will be taken
in a tumbrel, in your shift, with bare feet, and a rope about your
neck, before the grand portal of Notre-Dame, and you will there make an
apology with a wax torch of the weight of two pounds in your hand, and
thence you will be conducted to the Place de Greve, where you will be
hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; and likewise your goat; and
you will pay to the official three lions of gold, in reparation of the
crimes by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery and magic,
debauchery and murder, upon the person of the Sieur Phoebus de
Chateaupers. May God have mercy on your soul!"

"Oh! 'tis a dream!" she murmured; and she felt rough hands bearing her
away.

CHAPTER IV. _LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA_--LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE WHO
ENTER HERE.

In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was almost
as much of it in the earth as above it. Unless built upon piles, like
Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double bottom.
In cathedrals, it was, in some sort, another subterranean cathedral,
low, dark, mysterious, blind, and mute, under the upper nave which was
overflowing with light and reverberating with organs and bells day and
night. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In palaces, in fortresses, it was
a prison, sometimes a sepulchre also, sometimes both together. These
mighty buildings, whose mode of formation and vegetation we have
elsewhere explained, had not simply foundations, but, so to speak,
roots which ran branching through the soil in ch