All histories, memoirs, chronicles, and legends are agreed that the Conciergerie of the Revolution was a frightful place. The political prisoners endured all the horrors, physical and mental, of an unparalleled régime. Sick and unattended, hungry and barely fed, cold and left to shiver in dark and naked cells—these were amongst the ills of the body. But greater by far than these must have been the pangs of the mind. Nearly all of these prisoners, men and women both, regarded death as a certainty; before ever they were tried, from the moment that the outer door of the prison had closed behind them, the guillotine was as good as promised to them. They had no help to count on from without, they had not even the animating hope of a fair hearing by an upright judge. The judgment bar of Fouquier-Tinville did not pretend to be impartial. Nevertheless, though the blade of the guillotine was suspended over all heads, and fell daily upon many, an air of mingled serenity and exaltation reigned throughout the gaol. There were few tears, and there was no weak repining. Morning and evening, the political prisoners chanted in chorus the hymns of the Revolution, and these were varied by witty verses on the guillotine, composed in some instances by prisoners on the eve of passing beneath the knife. Some had brought in with them their favourite books, and reading led to long discussions, of which literature, science, religion, and politics were alternately the themes. Devoted priests like the Abbé Emory went about making converts, and opposing their efforts to those of the militant atheist, Anacharsis Clootz, who styled himself the "personal enemy of Jesus Christ." For recreation, old games were played and new ones invented. Imagine a crowd of prisoners of both sexes, living in daily expectation of the scaffold, who played for hours together at the _guillotine_! A hall of the prison was transformed into Tinville's tribunal, a Tinville was placed on the bench who could parody the voice and manner of the terrible original, the prisoner was arraigned, there were eloquent counsel on both sides, and witnesses; and when the trial was finished, and the inevitable sentence had been pronounced, the guillotine of chairs and laths was set up, and amid a tumult of applause the wooden blade was loosed and the victim rolled into the basket. Sometimes the game was interrupted, and there was a general rush to the window to catch the voice of the crier in the street,—"Here's the list of the brigands who have won to-day at the lottery of the blessed guillotine!"