ament, had been formed a narrow and dark passage, in
which, as one of them remarked, "every crime could be committed with
impunity."

Leaving on one side the First President's Room and opening the door which
bore the inscription "Council Chamber," a large room was crossed,
furnished with a huge horse-shoe table, surrounded by green chairs. At
the end of this room, which in 1793 had served as a deliberating hall for
the juries of the Revolutionary Tribunal, there was a door placed in the
wainscoting, which led into a little lobby where were two doors, on the
right the door of the room appertaining to the President of the Criminal
Chamber, on the left the door of the Refreshment Room. "Sentenced to
death!--Now let us go and dine!" These two ideas, Death and Dinner, have
jostled against each other for centuries. A third door closed the
extremity of this lobby. This door was, so to speak, the last of the
Palace of Justice, the farthest off, the least known, the most hidden; it
opened into what was called the Library of the Court of Cassation, a
large square room lighted by two windows overlooking the great inner yard
of the Conciergerie, furnished with a few leather chairs, a large table
covered with green cloth, and with law books lining the walls from the
floor to the ceiling.

This room, as may be seen, is the most secluded and the best hidden of
any in the Palace.

It was here,--in this room, that there arrived successively on the 2d
December, towards eleven o'clock in the morning, numerous men dressed in
black, without robes, without badges of office, affrighted, bewildered,
shaking their heads, and whispering together. These trembling men were
the High Court of Justice.

The High Court of Justice, according to the terms of the Constitution,
was composed of seven magistrates; a President, four Judges, and two
Assistants, chosen by the Court of Cassation from among its own members
and renewed every year.

In December, 1851, these seven judges were named Hardouin, Pataille,
Moreau, Delapalme, Cauchy, Grandet, and Quesnault, the two last-named
being Assistants.

These men, almost unknown, had nevertheless some antecedents. M. Cauchy,
a few years previously President of the Chamber of the Royal Court of
Paris, an amiable man and easily frightened, was the brother of the
mathematician, member of the Institute, to whom we owe the computation of
waves of sound, and of the ex-Registrar Archivist of the Chamber of
Peers