m in
his flight and was leading him back.

He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of
was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished
brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb
might gaze into the eye of a tiger.

He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step
and approached the door.

Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall
like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not
hear.

Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near
the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.

He was in the court-room.

CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION

He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and
remained standing, contemplating what he saw.

It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full
of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty
and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of
development.

At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with
abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or
closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in
all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,
spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was
yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room
lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in
the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and
august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is
called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.

No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were
directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small
door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench,
illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.

This man was the man.

He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as
though they had known beforehand where that figure was.

He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same
in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his
bristling hai