“You can see for yourselves he’s drunk and asleep!”

“Listen to him—­he is insulting the sovereign people.”

“Pitch him in the river!”

“Swing him on a lamp-post.”

“Shoot him!”

Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him in the back to help him along, Jean was haled before an officer, who there and then signed an order of arrest.

XXXV

He had been in solitary confinement in a cell at the depot for sixteen days now—­or was it fifteen?—­he was not sure.  The hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony and tediousness.

At the start he had demanded justice and loudly protested his innocence.  But he had come to realize at last that justice had no concern with his case or that of the priests and gendarmes confined within the same walls.  He had given up all thought of persuading the savage frenzy of the Commune to listen to reason, and deemed it the wisest thing to hold his tongue and the best to be forgotten.  He trembled to think how easily it might end in tragedy, and his anguish seemed to choke him.

Sometimes, as he sat dreaming, he could see a tree against a patch of blue sky, and great tears would rise to his eyes.

It was there, in his prison cell, Jean learned to know the shadowy joys of memory.

He thought of his good old father sitting at his work-bench or tightening the screw of the press; he thought of the shop packed with bound volumes and bindings, of his little room where of evenings he read books of travel—­of all the familiar things of home.  And every time he reviewed in spirit the poor thin romance of his unpretending life, he felt his cheeks burn to think how it was all dominated, almost every episode controlled, by this drunken parasite of a Tudesco!  It was true nevertheless!  Paramount over his studies, his loves, his dangers, over all his existence, loomed the rubicund face of the old villain!  The shame of it!  He had lived very ill! but what a meagre life it had been too.  How cruel it was, how unjust! and there was more of self-pity in the poor, sore heart than of anger.

Every day, every hour he thought of Gabrielle; but how changed the complexion of his love for her!  Now it was a tender, tranquil sentiment, a disinterested affection, a sweet, soothing reverie.  It was a vision of a wondrous delicacy, such as loneliness and unhappiness alone can form in the souls they shield from the rude shocks of the common life—­the dream of a holy life, a life dim and overshadowed, vowed wholly and completely, without reward or recompense, to the woman worshipped from afar, as that of the good country cure is vowed to the God who never steps down from the tabernacle of the altar.

His gaoler was a good-natured sous-officier who, amazed and horrified at what was going forward, clung to discipline as a sheet-anchor in the general shipwreck.  He felt a rough, uncouth pity for his prisoners, but this never interfered with the strict performance of his duties, and Jean, who had no experience of soldiers’ ways, never guessed the man’s true character.  However, he grew less and less unbending and taciturn the nearer the army of order approached the city.