On reaching the rue des Poules through the rue des Postes, Theodose and Dutocq saw a great assemblage of men and women, and by the light which the wine-merchant’s little oil-lamps cast upon these groups, they were horrified at beholding that mass of red, seamed, haggard faces; solemn with suffering, withered, distorted, swollen with wine, pallid from liquor; some threatening, others resigned, some sarcastic or jeering, others besotted; all rising from the midst of those terrible rags, which no designer can surpass in his most extravagant caricatures.

“I shall be recognized,” said Theodose, pulling Dutocq away; “we have done a foolish thing to come here at this hour and take him in the midst of his business.”

“All the more that Claparon may be sleeping in his lair, the interior of which we know nothing about.  Yes, there are dangers for you, but none for me; I shall be thought to have business with my copying-clerk, and I’ll go and tell him to come and dine with us; this is court day, so we can’t have him to breakfast.  I’ll tell him to meet us at the ‘Chaumiere’ in one of the garden dining-rooms.”

“Bad; anybody could listen to us there without being seen,” said la Peyrade.  “I prefer the ‘Petit Rocher de Cancale’; we can go into a private room and speak low.”

“But suppose you are seen with Cerizet?”

“Well, then, let’s go to the ‘Cheval Rouge,’ quai de la Tournelle.”

“That’s best; seven o’clock; nobody will be there then.”

Dutocq advanced alone into the midst of that congress of beggars, and he heard his own name repeated from mouth to mouth, for he could hardly fail to encounter among them some jail-bird familiar with the judge’s office, just as Theodose was certain to have met a client.

In these quarters the justice-of-peace is the supreme authority; all legal contests stop short at his office, especially since the law was passed giving to those judges sovereign power in all cases of litigation involving not over one hundred and forty francs.  A way was made for the judge’s clerk, who was not less feared than the judge himself.  He saw women seated on the staircase; a horrible display of pallor and suffering of many kinds.  Dutocq was almost asphyxiated when he opened the door of the room in which already sixty persons had left their odors.

“Your number? your number?” cried several voices.

“Hold your jaw!” cried a gruff voice from the street, “that’s the pen of the judge.”

Profound silence followed.  Dutocq found his copying clerk clothed in a jacket of yellow leather like that of the gloves of the gendarmerie, beneath which he wore an ignoble waistcoat of knitted wool.  The reader must imagine the man’s diseased head issuing from this species of scabbard and covered with a miserable Madras handkerchief, which, leaving to view the forehead and neck, gave to that head, by the gleam of a tallow candle of twelve to the pound, its naturally hideous and threatening character.