was desired concerning the other, in order to exonerate himself; they were ignorant of their fate, they lost all sense of the meaning of words, they were no longer conscious of themselves, their bodies, their souls; they felt themselves encompassed by invisible clasps, and each sought to free himself on his own account, without knowing what he had actually done or failed to do. Every day new arrests were made, no traveler passing through was sure of his freedom, and after a few weeks half of France was seized with the intoxication of rage, a craving for revenge, and fear. Of the figures of the ludicrously-gruesome murder imbroglio, now this, now that one emerged with greater distinctness and reality, and the one that stood out finally as the most important, because her name was constantly brought forward, was the veiled lady with the green feather in her hat; nay, she gradually became the centre and impelling power of the bloody deed, perhaps only because her origin and existence remained a mystery. Many raised their voices in suspicion against Charlotte Arlabosse, but she was able to establish her innocence by well-nigh unassailable testimony; besides, she appeared too harmless and too much like a victim of Bastide's tyrannical cruelty, to answer to the demoniacal picture of the mysterious unknown. While Bach and Bousquier, in a rivalry which hastened their own ruin, tempted the authorities to clemency by ever new inventions, and, encouraged by the gossip which filtered through to them by subterranean channels, disturbed further the already troubled waters; while the soldier Colard and the Bancal couple, owing to the rigorous confinement, the harsh treatment of the keepers, and the excruciating hearings, were thrown into paroxysms of insanity, so that they reported things which even Jausion, used as he was to extravagance, had to characterize as the mere phantoms of a dream; while the other prisoners, steering unsteadily between their actual experiences and morbid visions, constantly suspected each other, and retracted today what they had sworn to yesterday, now whined for mercy, now maintained a defiant silence; while the inhabitants of the city, the villages, the whole province, demanded the termination of the long-winded procedure and the punishment of the evil-doers, with a fanaticism whose fire was tended and fed by mysterious agents; while, finally, the court, in the uncontrollably increasing flood of accusations and calumnies, lost its sense of direction, and was gradually becoming a tool in the hands of the populace;--in the meanwhile the boundless forces at work succeeded in poisoning the mind of a child, who appeared as a witness against father and mother, and led the deluded people to believe that God himself had by a miracle loosened the tongue of an infant. [Illustration: JAKOB WASSERMANN]