"When he returns be on your guard. But we must wait for Pique-Vinaigre, without him we can do nothing." "No?" "No." "And Germain shall be done for?" "I'll take care of that." "But with what? They have taken all our knives away." "What do you think of these nippers, would you like to have your neck in their clutch?" asked the Skeleton, opening his long bony fingers, hard as iron. "You'll choke him?" "Decidedly." "But if they find out that it is you?" "Well, what if they do? Am I a calf with two heads, such as they show at the fair?" "No, that's true; a man has but one throat, and yours--" "Is sentenced; my lawyer told me so yesterday. I was taken with my hand in the bag, and my knife in the weasand of the stiff'un. I'm a 'return horse,' too; so nothing can be more certain. I'll drop my head into Charlot's (the headsman's) basket, and I shall see if it's true that he does his customers, and puts sawdust into his basket instead of the bran which government allows us." "True, the guillotine has a right to its bran. Now, I remember my father was robbed in the same way," said Nicholas Martial, with a ferocious grin. This horrid jest created immense laughter amongst the prisoners. This is fearful, but far from exaggeration; we give but a faint idea of these conversations, so common in prisons. The prisoners were all laughing joyously. "Thousand thunders!" cried the Skeleton. "I wish they who punish us would come and see how we bear it. If they will come to the Barriere St. Jacques the day of my benefit they will hear me address the audience in a neat and appropriate speech, and say to Charlot, in a gentlemanly tone, 'Pere Sampson, the cord if you please.'"[1] [1] To understand this horrid jest the English reader must know that the doors in France are usually opened by the porter, who sits in his room and pulls a cord to allow the person going out to have free egress; and the blade of the guillotine glides down the grooves of the machine, after a spring has been set in motion, by touching a cord that acts upon it. Fresh bursts of laughter hailed this jest. "And then Charlot opens the baker's (the devil's) door," continued the Skeleton, still smoking his pipe. "Ah, bah! Is there a devil?"