the quagmire of lies, inspired
security. Bastide was hopelessly entangled. The prisoners were thrown
into a panic by the palpable agitation of the people; each one appeared
guilty in the other's eyes, each one was ready to admit anything that
was desired concerning the other, in order to exonerate himself; they
were ignorant of their fate, they lost all sense of the meaning of
words, they were no longer conscious of themselves, their bodies, their
souls; they felt themselves encompassed by invisible clasps, and each
sought to free himself on his own account, without knowing what he had
actually done or failed to do. Every day new arrests were made, no
traveler passing through was sure of his freedom, and after a few weeks
half of France was seized with the intoxication of rage, a craving for
revenge, and fear. Of the figures of the ludicrously-gruesome murder
imbroglio, now this, now that one emerged with greater distinctness and
reality, and the one that stood out finally as the most important,
because her name was constantly brought forward, was the veiled lady
with the green feather in her hat; nay, she gradually became the centre
and impelling power of the bloody deed, perhaps only because her origin
and existence remained a mystery. Many raised their voices in suspicion
against Charlotte Arlabosse, but she was able to establish her
innocence by well-nigh unassailable testimony; besides, she appeared
too harmless and too much like a victim of Bastide's tyrannical
cruelty, to answer to the demoniacal picture of the mysterious unknown.

While Bach and Bousquier, in a rivalry which hastened their own ruin,
tempted the authorities to clemency by ever new inventions, and,
encouraged by the gossip which filtered through to them by subterranean
channels, disturbed further the already troubled waters; while the
soldier Colard and the Bancal couple, owing to the rigorous
confinement, the harsh treatment of the keepers, and the excruciating
hearings, were thrown into paroxysms of insanity, so that they reported
things which even Jausion, used as he was to extravagance, had to
characterize as the mere phantoms of a dream; while the other
prisoners, steering unsteadily between their actual experiences and
morbid visions, constantly suspected each other, and retracted today
what they had sworn to yesterday, now whined for mercy, now maintained
a defiant silence; while the inhabitants of the city, the villages, the
whole province