What a degradation! He perspired with anguish, unhappy man, while listening to the exclamations of the tourists as they walked away. Fortunately, the anguish was not renewed. No more tourists arrived that day on account of the bad weather. A terrible wind blew through the rotten boards, moans came up from the pit as from victims ill-buried, and the wash of the lake, swollen with rain, beat against the walls to the level of the window-slits and spattered its water upon the captive. At intervals the bell of a passing steamer, the clack of its paddle-wheels cut short the reflections of poor Tartarin, as evening, gray and gloomy, fell into the dungeon and seemed to enlarge it. How explain this arrest, this imprisonment in the ill-omened place? Costecalde, perhaps... electioneering manoeuvre at the last hour?.. Or, could it be that the Russian police, warned of his very imprudent language, his liaison with Sonia, had asked for his extradition? But if so, why arrest the delegates?.. What blame could attach to those poor unfortunates, whose terror and despair he imagined, although they were not, like him, in Bonnivard’s dungeon, beneath those granite arches, where, since night had fallen, roamed monstrous rats, cockroaches, silent spiders with hairy, crooked legs. But see what it is to possess a good conscience! In spite of rats, cold, spiders, and beetles, the great Tartarin found in the horror of that state-prison, haunted by the shades of martyrs, the same solid and sonorous sleep, mouth open, fists closed, which came to him, between the abysses and heaven, in the hut of the Alpine Club. He fancied he was dreaming when he heard his jailer say in the morning:-- “Get up; the prefect of the district is here... He has come to examine you...” Adding, with a certain respect, “To bring the prefect out in this way... why, you must be a famous scoundrel.” Scoundrel! no--but you may look like one, after spending the night in a damp and dusty dungeon without having a chance to make a toilet, however limited. And when, in the former stable of the castle transformed into a guardroom with muskets in racks along the walls,--when, I say, Tartarin, after a reassuring glance at his Alpinists seated between two gendarmes, appeared before the prefect of the district, he felt his disreputable appearance in presence of that correct and solemn magistrate with the carefully trimmed beard, who said to him sternly:-- “You call yourself Manilof, do you not?.. Russian subject... incendiary at St. Petersburg, refugee and murderer in Switzerland.” “Never in my life... It is all a mistake, an error...” “Silence, or I ‘ll gag you...” interrupted the captain. The immaculate prefect continued: “To put an end to your denials... Do you know this rope?” His rope! _coquin de sort!_ His rope, woven with iron, made at Avignon. He lowered his head, to the stupefaction of the delegates, and said: “I know it.” “With this rope a man has been hung in the Canton of Unterwald...”