ng to prevent your seeing her again. She has married
Fortune Chassagne."

"She has written to you?"

"No."

"How, then, have you had news of her, mother?"

"It was not by letter, Evariste; it was...."

He sprang up and stopped her with a savage cry:

"Not another word, mother! Do not tell me they have both returned to
France.... As they are doomed to perish, at least let it not be at my
hands. For their own sake, for yours, for mine, let me not know they are
in Paris.... Do not force the knowledge on me; otherwise...."

"What do you mean, my son? you would think, you would dare...?"

"Mother, hear what I say; if I knew my sister Julie to be in that room
..." (and he pointed at the closed door), "I should go instantly to
denounce her to the Committee of Vigilance of the Section."

The poor mother, her face as white as her coif, dropped her knitting
from her trembling hands and sighed in a voice fainter than the faintest
whisper:

"I would not believe it, but I see it now; my boy is a monster...."

As pale as she, the froth gathering on his lips, Evariste fled from the
house and ran to find at Elodie's side forgetfulness, sleep, the
delicious foretaste of extinction.

XIX

While the Pere Longuemare and the girl Athenais were examined at the
Section, Brotteaux was led off between two gendarmes to the Luxembourg,
where the door-keeper refused to admit him, declaring he had no room
left. The old financier was next taken to the Conciergerie and brought
into the Gaoler's office, quite a small room, divided in two by a glazed
partition. While the clerk was inscribing his name in the prison
registers, Brotteaux could see through the panes two men lying each on a
tattered mattress, both as still as death and with glazed eyes that
seemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles and bits of broken bread and meat
littered the floor round them. They were prisoners condemned to death
and waiting for the cart to arrive.

The _ci-devant_ Monsieur des Ilettes was thrust into a dungeon, where by
the light of a lantern he could just make out two figures stretched on
the ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the other
graceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of their
straw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was better
than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement.
Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and sat
there, his head again