etude of respectability,
the sincerity of a clear conscience.

As men of the better class are few, and shame keeps the few whose crimes
have brought them within doors, the frequenters of the prison-yard
are for the most part dressed as workmen. Blouses, long and short,
and velveteen jackets preponderate. These coarse or dirty
garments, harmonizing with the coarse and sinister faces and brutal
manner--somewhat subdued, indeed, by the gloomy reflections that weigh
on men in prison--everything, to the silence that reigns, contributes to
strike terror or disgust into the rare visitor who, by high influence,
has obtained the privilege, seldom granted, of going over the
Conciergerie.

Just as the sight of an anatomical museum, where foul diseases are
represented by wax models, makes the youth who may be taken there
more chaste and apt for nobler and purer love, so the sight of the
Conciergerie and of the prison-yard, filled with men marked for the
hulks or the scaffold or some disgraceful punishment, inspires many, who
might not fear that Divine Justice whose voice speaks so loudly to the
conscience, with a fear of human justice; and they come out honest men
for a long time after.

As the men who were exercising in the prison-yard, when _Trompe-la-Mort_
appeared there, were to be the actors in a scene of crowning importance
in the life of Jacques Collin, it will be well to depict a few of the
principal personages of this sinister crowd.

Here, as everywhere when men are thrown together, here, as at school
even, force, physical and moral, wins the day. Here, then, as on the
hulks, crime stamps the man's rank. Those whose head is doomed are
the aristocracy. The prison-yard, as may be supposed, is a school of
criminal law, which is far better learned there than at the Hall on the
Place du Pantheon.

A never-failing pleasantry is to rehearse the drama of the Assize Court;
to elect a president, a jury, a public prosecutor, a counsel, and to
go through the whole trial. This hideous farce is played before almost
every great trial. At this time a famous case was proceeding in the
Criminal Court, that of the dreadful murder committed on the persons
of Monsieur and Madame Crottat, the notary's father and mother, retired
farmers who, as this horrible business showed, kept eight hundred
thousand francs in gold in their house.

One of the men concerned in this double murder was the notorious
Dannepont, known as la Pouraille, a