Here I am transferred, then. Let me record the details.
At half-past seven the messenger again presented himself at the
threshold of my dungeon. “Sir,” said he, “I wait for you.”
Alas! and I saw that four others did the same! I rose, and advanced one
step. It appeared to me I could not make a second. My head was so heavy,
and my limbs so feeble; but I made an effort to conquer my weakness, and
assumed an appearance of firmness.
Prior to leaving the cell, I gave it a final look; I had almost become
attached to it. Besides, I left it empty and open, which gives so
strange an appearance to a dungeon.
It will not be long untenanted. The turnkeys said they expected some one
this evening,--a prisoner who was then being tried at the Court of
Assizes.
At the turn of the corridor the Chaplain rejoined us; he had just
breakfasted.
At the threshold of the gaol, the Governor took me by the hand; he had
reinforced my escort by four veterans.
By the door of the Infirmary a dying old man exclaimed, “Good bye, we
shall soon meet again!”
We arrived in the courtyard, where I could breathe again freely, and
this refreshed me greatly; but we did not walk long in the open air. The
carriage was stationed in the first court. It was the same which had
brought me there,--a sort of oblong van, divided into two sections by a
transverse grating of close wire. Each section had a door; one in the
front, one in the back of the cart; the whole so dirty, so black, so
dusty, that the hearse for paupers is a state carriage by comparison!
Before I buried myself in this moving tomb, I cast a look round the
yard,--one of those despairing looks which seem to ask a miracle. The
court was already encumbered with spectators. Like the day when the
convicts departed, there was a slight, chilling shower of the season; it
is raining still, and doubtless there will be rain all the day,--which
will last when I am no more! We entered the van. The messenger and a
gendarme, in the front compartment, the Priest, myself, and a gendarme
in the other, with four mounted gendarmes around the carriage. As I
entered it, an old grey-eyed woman who stood near exclaimed, “I like
seeing this, even better than seeing the galley convicts!”
I can conceive this. It is a spectacle more easily taken in at one view.
Nothing divides the attention; there is but one man, and on this
isolated being there is as much misery heaped as on all the other
convicts together. The van passed with a dull noise under the gateway,
and the heavy doors of the Bicêtre were closed after us. I felt myself
moving, but in stupor, like a man fallen into a lethargy, who can
neither move nor cry out, and who fancies he feels that he is being
buried alive. I listened vaguely to the peal of bells on the collars of
the post-horses which drew the van, the iron wheels grating over various
substances in the road, the clacking whips of the postillion, the
galloping of the gendarmes round the carriage,--all seemed like a
whirlwind which bore me away.
My mind was so stupefied with grief that I only conceived ideas as in a
dream. I saw the blue towers of Nôtre Dame in the distance. “Those who
will be on the tower with the flag will see my execution well,” said I
to myself, smiling stupidly.
I think it was at that moment that the Priest addressed me again; I
patiently let him speak. I had already in my ears the noise of the
wheels, the galloping horses, and the postillion’s whip; therefore it
was only one more incomprehensible noise. I listened in silence to that
flow of monotonous words, which deadened my thoughts, like the murmur of
a brook; and they passed before my torpid mind, always varied yet always
the same, like the crooked elms we passed by the road-side. The short
and jerking voice of the messenger in the front of the van suddenly
aroused me.
“Well, Chaplain,” said he, in almost a gay tone, “what news have you
to-day?”
The Chaplain, who spoke to me without ceasing, and who was deafened by
the carriage, made no answer.
“Well, well! how the van rattles; one can hardly hear oneself. What was
I saying to you, Chaplain! Oh, aye!--do you know the great news of Paris
to-day?”