in
he protested:

"You can see for yourselves he's drunk and asleep!"

"Listen to him--he is insulting the sovereign people."

"Pitch him in the river!"

"Swing him on a lamp-post."

"Shoot him!"

Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him in the back
to help him along, Jean was haled before an officer, who there
and then signed an order of arrest.

XXXV

He had been in solitary confinement in a cell at the _depot_
for sixteen days now--or was it fifteen?--he was not sure. The
hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony and tediousness.

At the start he had demanded justice and loudly protested his
innocence. But he had come to realize at last that justice had
no concern with his case or that of the priests and gendarmes
confined within the same walls. He had given up all thought of
persuading the savage frenzy of the Commune to listen to reason,
and deemed it the wisest thing to hold his tongue and the best
to be forgotten. He trembled to think how easily it might end
in tragedy, and his anguish seemed to choke him.

Sometimes, as he sat dreaming, he could see a tree against a patch
of blue sky, and great tears would rise to his eyes.

It was there, in his prison cell, Jean learned to know the shadowy
joys of memory.

He thought of his good old father sitting at his work-bench or
tightening the screw of the press; he thought of the shop packed
with bound volumes and bindings, of his little room where of
evenings he read books of travel--of all the familiar things of
home. And every time he reviewed in spirit the poor thin romance
of his unpretending life, he felt his cheeks burn to think how
it was all dominated, almost every episode controlled, by this
drunken parasite of a Tudesco! It was true nevertheless! Paramount
over his studies, his loves, his dangers, over all his existence,
loomed the rubicund face of the old villain! The shame of it!
He had lived very ill! but what a meagre life it had been too.
How cruel it was, how unjust! and there was more of self-pity
in the poor, sore heart than of anger.

Every day, every hour he thought of Gabrielle; but how changed
the complexion of his love for her! Now it was a tender, tranquil
sentiment, a disinterested affection, a sweet, soothing reverie.
It was a vision of a wondrous delicacy, such as loneliness and
unhappiness alone can form in the souls they shield from the
rude shocks of the common life--the dream of a holy life, a life