ere the freest from it. To come out of
the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,
dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and
begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the
nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever
shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with
occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious
drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling
in the sun one day. In Marseilles that day there was a villainous
prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the
obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected
light as it could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men,
a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a
draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of draughts,
made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two
or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats
and other unseen vermin, in addition to the seen vermin, the two men.

It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars
fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be
always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.
There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom
of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.
Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with
his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the
opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to
admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on
negligently, for his greater ease.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the
imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all
deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,
so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air
was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,
the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have
kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the
Indian ocean.

The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked
his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one
shoulder,