Coming, at the end of melancholy vaulted passages, to a flight of stone steps leading up to a door, I was suddenly conscious of a droning murmur like that of hived bees. The jailer, in the act of running the key into the lock, beckoned me to mount to him, and, thus possessed of me, caught me under the arm-pit. “Play thy card, then, like a gambler!” said he. “What!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “Ah bah!” he growled; “didst thou think delicacy kept me from reading the message? But, fear not. Thou art too little a gudgeon for my playing”--and he swung open the door. Immediately the hiss and patter of voices swept upon me like rain. That, and the broad glare of daylight after so much darkness, confused me for a moment. The next I woke to the consciousness that at last my foot was on the precipice path--the gangway for the passage of the pre-damned into the Salle de la Liberté--the _arête_ of the “Montagne,” it might be called, seeing how it served that extreme faction for a ridge most perilous to its enemies to walk on. This gangway skirted a wooden barricade that cut the hall at about a third of its length. To my left, as I advanced, I caught glimpse over the partition of the dismal black plumes on the hats of the judges, as they bobbed in juxtaposition of evil under a canopy of green cloth. To my right, loosely filling the body of the hall, was the public; and here my extreme insignificance as a prisoner was negatively impressed upon me by the indifference of those whom I almost brushed in passing, for scarce a _poissarde_ of them all deigned to notice the little gudgeon as he wriggled on the national hook. Then in a moment my conductor twisted me through an opening cut in the barricade, and I was delivered over to the Tribunal. A certain drumming in my ears, a certain mist before my eyes, resolved themselves into a very set manner of attention. The stark, whitewashed walls seemed spotted with a plague of yellow faces--to my left a throng of mean blotches, the obsequious counsel for the defence; to my front the President and judges, in number three, like skulls decked with hearse-plumes; to my right the jury, a very Pandora-box of goblins, the lid left off, the evil countenances swarming over the edge. All seemed to my excited imagination to be faces and nothing else--drab, dirty, and malignant--ugly motes set against the staring white of the walls, dancing fantastically in the white day-beams that poured down from the high windows. Yet that I sought for most I could not at first distinguish,--not until the owner of it stood erect by a little table--placed to one side and a little forward of the judicial dais--over which he had been leaning. Then I recognised him instantly--Tinville, the Devil’s Advocate, the blood-boltered vampire--and from that moment he was the court to me, judge, jury, and counsel, and his dark face swam only in my vision like a gout of bile.