indefinable mixture of treachery and truth, a cunningly planned fraud
which does not break the letter of the law, or a piece of deft
trickery for which there is no legal remedy. St. Bartholomew's for
instance, was a political combination.

Imprisonment for debt, for reasons previously explained, is such a
rare occurrence in the provinces, that there is no house of detention,
and a debtor is perforce imprisoned with the accused, convicted, and
condemned--the three graduated subdivisions of the class generically
styled criminal. David was put for the time being in a cell on the
ground floor from which some prisoner had probably been recently
discharged at the end of his time. Once inscribed on the jailer's
register, with the amount allowed by the law for a prisoner's board
for one month, David confronted a big, stout man, more powerful than
the King himself in a prisoner's eyes; this was the jailer.

An instance of a thin jailer is unknown in the provinces. The place,
to begin with, is almost a sinecure, and a jailer is a kind of
innkeeper who pays no rent and lives very well, while his prisoners
fare very ill; for, like an innkeeper, he gives them rooms according
to their payments. He knew David by name, and what was more, knew
about David's father, and thought that he might venture to let the
printer have a good room on credit for one night; for David was
penniless.

The prison of Angouleme was built in the Middle Ages, and has no more
changed than the old cathedral. It is built against the old _presidial_,
or ancient court of appeal, and people still call it the _maison de
justice_. It boasts the conventional prison gateway, the solid-looking,
nail-studded door, the low, worn archway which the better deserves the
qualification "cyclopean," because the jailer's peephole or _judas_
looks out like a single eye from the front of the building. As you
enter you find yourself in a corridor which runs across the entire
width of the building, with a row of doors of cells that give upon the
prison yard and are lighted by high windows covered with a square iron
grating. The jailer's house is separated from these cells by an
archway in the middle, through which you catch a glimpse of the iron
gate of the prison yard. The jailer installed David in a cell next to
the archway, thinking that he would like to have a man of David's
stamp as a near neighbor for the sake of company.

"This is the best room," he said. David was struc