A police-van deposited them at the prison.  They were transferred from one box to another.  At Mazas a clerk registered them, weighed them, measured them, and entered them into the jail book as convicts.  Having passed through the office, each of them was conducted along a gallery shrouded in darkness, through a long damp vault to a narrow door which was suddenly opened.  This reached, a jailer pushed the Representative in by the shoulders, and the door was shut.

The Representative, thus immured, found himself in a little, long, narrow, dark room.  It is this which the prudent language of modern legislation terms a “cell.”  Here the full daylight of a December noon only produced a dusky twilight.  At one end there was a door, with a little grating; at the other, close to the ceiling, at a height of ten or twelve feet, there was a loophole with a fluted glass window.  This window dimmed the eye, and prevented it from seeing the blue or gray of the sky, or from distinguishing the cloud from the sun’s ray, and invested the wan daylight of winter with an indescribable uncertainty.  It was even less than a dim light, it was a turbid light.  The inventors of this fluted window succeeded in making the heavens squint.

After a few moments the prisoner began to distinguish objects confusedly, and this is what he found:  White-washed walls here and there turned green by various exhalations; in one corner a round hole guarded by iron bars, and exhaling a disgusting smell; in another corner a slab turning upon a hinge like the bracket seat of a fiacre, and thus capable of being used as a table; no bed; a straw-bottomed chair; under foot a brick floor.  Gloom was the first impression; cold was the second.  There, then, the prisoner found himself, alone, chilled, in this semi-darkness, being able to walk up and down the space of eight square feet like a caged wolf, or to remain seated on his chair like an idiot at Bicetre.

In this situation an ex-Republican of the Eve, who had become a member of the majority, and on occasions sided somewhat with the Bonapartists, M. Emile Leroux, who had, moreover, been thrown into Mazas by mistake, having doubtless been taken for some other Leroux, began to weep with rage.  Three, four, five hours thus passed away.  In the meanwhile they had not eaten since the morning; some of them, in the excitement caused by the coup d’etat had not even breakfasted.  Hunger came upon them.  Were they to be forgotten there?  No; a bell rang in the prison, the grating of the door opened, and an arm held out to the prisoner a pewter porringer and a piece of bread.

The prisoner greedily seized the bread and the porringer.  The bread was black and sticky; the porringer contained a sort of thick water, warm and reddish.  Nothing can be compared to the smell of this “soup.”  As for the bread, it only smelt of mouldiness.

However great their hunger, most of the prisoners during the first moment threw down their bread on the floor, and emptied the porringer down the hole with the iron bars.