“You may, for to-morrow will bring the proof. The order of Gosner’s release was signed this morning, and is now in Paris.” The governor was on his feet at once. “What is to be done? You came here for something more than this. Madame Du Berry has heard of Gosner’s pardon. She sent you here. What does she propose? This is a case that concerns us all, and may destroy us all.” “Unless proper steps are taken,” said the page, in a low voice. “But what steps can be taken?” “You ask me that?” answered the page, with a strange smile on his lips; “you, who know all the mysteries of this prison, who receive men without record, and send them forth for burial with a number instead of a name?” “Who told you these things?” demanded the governor, with a sudden panic. “No matter; I know, also, that this man, Dr. Gosner, is not an inmate of this prison. He was buried within the month, and the number attached to his name is registered against it.” “You know this?” cried the governor. “Rather you suggest it.” “Yes, I suggest it. This man must not be let loose to prowl the streets of Paris, and drive the rabble wild with his stories of the Bastille, its cruelties, its dungeons, and its underground horrors. He was a man of wonderful eloquence, and freedom will touch his tongue with fire. His white hair, the wonderful pathos in his eyes, and that shadowy form, will excite the people to terrible wrath.” The governor was trembling visibly throughout his entire frame. He leaned his hand so heavily on the table that the glasses, with the amber and ruby-tinted drops left in them, shook and rattled together beneath his pressure. “Madame Du Berry was the person who cast this man into prison, the people hate her already,” continued the page, who was himself growing strangely pale. “This man will first assail her; as for yourself——” The governor dropped into the chair he had left, and gazed upon the page with frightened eyes and parted lips, a remembrance of all he had done to the prisoner since his incarceration, of the neglect, starvation, the awful solitude in which he had been left, year after year, scarcely speaking to a human being, swept over him in all the blackness of its horrors. “As for yourself,” continued the page, “all the enormous cruelties practiced in the Bastille, during the last twenty years, will be heaped upon your shoulders. This man has been an inmate of the lower-cells; he has been chained by the waist to your dank walls, over which reptiles were eternally dragging their slime across and around him; he has heard the perpetual lapping of fetid waters against the enormous walls, which were not thick enough to keep the poisonous drops from creeping down them and dropping on his hands, his hair, and his emaciated limbs——” “Hold! hold!” cried the governor. “If this man says but half of these things to the people, they will seize upon me in the street and tear me limb from limb.”