A heavy weight, such as magnetic influence affects the brain with, oppressed his forehead; he threw himself on the palliasse, and endeavored to recall the events of the last few hours:  but so rapid and intense had they been, that they already seemed to be numbered amongst the visions of the past.  When the heart is oppressed with suffering, and above all, with the most painful of all suffering, anxiety, solitude and sleep are the only consolations.  But then the sleep is not the light, happy, joyous slumber, from which we awake refreshed and strengthened; it is a leaden, sullen, sodden trance, from which we awake with the sensation that the whole weight of the atmosphere has been concentrated on our brows.  This was the case with Dumiger:  the flickering, dreary light of the lamp kept waving before his eyes as he lay there.  He felt like a man whose limbs have been paralyzed by some grievous accident.  At last be breathed heavily, and the load of oppression fell from his eyelids.  Such was the sleep we have described.

When he awoke in the morning the light had gone out; but a few pale, melancholy gleams of morning pierced the prison-bars, which were so far above him that it was not possible for him to reach them.  He strove to remember where he was; his eyes fell on the grotesquely-painted figures which covered the walls, and which had escaped his observation on the preceding night.  These were the handicraft of some man who had evidently endeavored to wile away his time in prison by caricaturing his persecutors; and certainly he had succeeded in the attempt.  Nothing more absurd than some of these pictures could be imagined; every possible deformity was ascribed to the originals, and the sketches were surrounded by pasquinades and quaint devices.  Here and there might be found expressions of deeper and more fearful import, if indeed anything could be more fearful than the contrast between the ridiculous and such a dungeon. “Non omnis moriar,” wrote one man in a yellow liquid, which too evidently was discolored blood. “Justum et tenacem recti virum,” scrawled another, immediately followed by a portrait of the “vultis instantis tyranni,” who had, if we may judge by the chain suspended from his neck, once been a famous Grand Master.  On one part of the wall might be deciphered a whole romance scrawled with an old nail, in which the prisoner had arrived at such excellence, that the letters were like the most admirable type.  It was a long, and doubtless melancholy tale; so much so, that the kind guardians of the place had scratched it with their knives to prevent its being easily deciphered.  In fact, that little cell had evidently contained an Iliad of romances; and if the walls could have spoken, or even the scrawls been deciphered, some strange tales, and perhaps many mysterious events, would have come to light.  Dumiger gazed on these sad records of prior existences with a melancholy interest.  In vain he endeavored to explain to himself the cause of his being treated with such unparalleled severity.  He could not recall any crime such as might excuse his incarceration in such an abominable place.  He buried his face in his hands.  He thought of Marguerite and the clock, and then, happily for him, he wept, as the young alone can weep when they are in sorrow, and when their sorrow is unselfish.