The wretched man obeyed, and his keeper took a seat beside him.

Nothing is more terrible and lugubrious than this gallery of the judges of instruction.

Stretching the whole length of the wall is a wooden bench blackened by constant use.  This bench has for the last ten years been daily occupied by all the murderers, thieves, and suspicious characters of the Department of the Seine.

Sooner or later, fatally, as filth rushes to a sewer, does crime reach this gallery, this dreadful gallery with one door opening on the galleys, the other on the scaffold.  This place was vulgarly and pithily denominated by a certain magistrate as the great public wash-house of all the dirty linen in Paris.

When Prosper reached the gallery it was full of people.  The bench was almost entirely occupied.  Beside him, so close as to touch his shoulder, sat a man with a sinister countenance, dressed in rags.

Before each door, which belonged to a judge of instruction, stood groups of witnesses talking in an undertone.

Policemen were constantly coming and going with prisoners.  Sometimes, above the noise of their heavy boots, tramping along the flagstones, could be heard a woman’s stifled sobs, and looking around you would see some poor mother or wife with her face buried in her handkerchief, weeping bitterly.

At short intervals a door would open and shut, and a bailiff call out a name or number.

This stifling atmosphere, and the sight of so much misery, made the cashier ill and faint; he was feeling as if another five minutes’ stay among these wretched creatures would make him deathly sick, when a little old man dressed in black, wearing the insignia of his office, a steel chain, cried out: 

“Prosper Bertomy!”

The unhappy man arose, and, without knowing how, found himself in the office of the judge of instruction.

For a moment he was blinded.  He had come out of a dark room; and the one in which he now found himself had a window directly opposite the door, so that a flood of light fell suddenly upon him.

This office, like all those on the gallery, was of a very ordinary appearance, small and dingy.

The wall was covered with cheap dark green paper, and on the floor was a hideous brown carpet, very much worn.

Opposite the door was a large desk, filled with bundles of law-papers, behind which was seated the judge, facing those who entered, so that his face remained in the shade, while that of the prisoner or witness whom he questioned was in a glare of light.

At the right, before a little table, sat a clerk writing, the indispensable auxiliary of the judge.

But Prosper observed none of these details:  his whole attention was concentrated upon the arbiter of his fate, and as he closely examined his face he was convinced that the jailer was right in calling him an honorable man.