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And as everyone had turned to go down, Lorin gave municipal officer Simon a swift kick so hard it sent him rolling and howling the whole length of the shiny steep stairs. The sectionaries couldn’t help themselves from laughing. Lorin put his hands nonchalantly in his pockets.

“In the exercise of my duties!” said Simon, livid with rage. “Oh, for crying out loud!” said Lorin. “Aren’t we all exercising our duties?”

They made him get in a fiacre and the commissioner escorted him to the Palais de Justice.

51

LORIN

If the reader will just bear with us while we pay a second visit to the Revolutionary Tribunal, we’ll find Maurice at the same spot where we saw him once before; but we’ll find him quite a bit paler and a lot more agitated.

As we reopen the curtain on this funereal stage where historical events rather than personal predilection have led us, the jurors are out deliberating, for a certain case has just been heard. Two accused who had already spruced themselves up for the scaffold—one of those brazen maneuvers by which, at the time, defendants tried to win over jurors—were chatting with their defense counsels, who were offering the usual vague words that a doctor despairing of a patient might glibly pronounce.

The mob in the galleries was in a ferocious mood that day, the kind of mood that excites the severity of the jurors: placed under the immediate surveillance of the tricoteuses—knitting away—and the working class faubouriens from the suburbs, jurors hold up better, sticking to their guns like actors redoubling their efforts before a hostile audience.

Accordingly, since ten-thirty in the morning, five defendants had already been turned into so many condemned by the same jurors, now rendered inflexible.

The two who found themselves in the dock were thus waiting to hear the yes or the no that would either restore them to life or hurl them into the jaws of death.

The mob in attendance, made ever more ferocious by the habitual nature of this daily tragedy, which had become its favorite spectacle, was warming them up, hectoring and shouting comments that had by then acquired a frightening force.

“Look, look, look! Look at the tall one!” said one of the tricoteuses, who, not having a cap, was sporting a tricolor cockade as big as a fist on her bun. “See how white he is! You’d think he was already dead!”

The condemned man looked at the harpie poking fun at him with a scornful smile.

“What do you say to that?” said her neighbor. “He’s laughing.”

“Yes—with one side of his face.”

One faubourien looked at his watch.

“What time is it?” his pal asked.

“Ten to one; this has been going on for three quarters of an hour.”

“Just like at Domfront, city of misfortune: arrive at twelve, get hanged at one.”

“And what about the little one!” cried someone else. “Look at him, then. Won’t he look a sight when he sneezes in the sack!”

“Bah! It all happens so fast, you don’t even have time to notice.”

“Hey, we’ll ask Sanson for his head; we’ve got a right to see it.”

“Notice how he’s wearing his best tyrant blue! It’s bloody lovely when poor folks like us can cut well-heeled fops like that down to size.”

Indeed, as the executioner had told the Queen, the poor inherited each victim’s personal effects, the spoils being transported to the Salpêtrière hospital as soon as the execution was over to be distributed among the destitute. That is where the murdered Queen’s clothes had been sent.

Maurice listened to these words whirling around in the air without taking a scrap of notice. Every person was at that moment preoccupied with some potent thought of their own that set them apart. For some days now his heart had beaten only intermittently and fitfully; now and again fear or hope seemed to suspend the ongoing pulse of his life, and these endless oscillations had more or less damaged his heart’s susceptibility: he felt only numbness now.

The jury returned to the chamber and, as expected, the foreman declared the two defendants condemned. They were taken away and marched out with a firm