t last
was informed by a bon bourgeois, who was wandering about the house of
Justice and who seemed to know its multifarious rules, that the prison
registers all over Paris could only be consulted by the public between
the hours of six and seven in the evening.

There was nothing for it but to wait. Armand, whose temples were
throbbing, who was footsore, hungry, and wretched, could gain nothing by
continuing his aimless wanderings through the labyrinthine building.
For close upon another hour he stood with his face glued against the
ironwork which separated him from the female prisoners' courtyard. Once
it seemed to him as if from its further end he caught the sound of that
exquisitely melodious voice which had rung forever in his ear since that
memorable evening when Jeanne's dainty footsteps had first crossed
the path of his destiny. He strained his eyes to look in the direction
whence the voice had come, but the centre of the courtyard was planted
with a small garden of shrubs, and Armand could not see across it. At
last, driven forth like a wandering and lost soul, he turned back and
out into the streets. The air was mild and damp. The sharp thaw had
persisted through the day, and a thin, misty rain was falling and
converting the ill-paved roads into seas of mud.

But of this Armand was wholly unconscious. He walked along the quay
holding his cap in his hand, so that the mild south wind should cool his
burning forehead.

How he contrived to kill those long, weary hours he could not afterwards
have said. Once he felt very hungry, and turned almost mechanically
into an eating-house, and tried to eat and drink. But most of the day he
wandered through the streets, restlessly, unceasingly, feeling neither
chill nor fatigue. The hour before six o'clock found him on the Quai
de l'Horloge in the shadow of the great towers of the Hall of Justice,
listening for the clang of the clock that would sound the hour of his
deliverance from this agonising torture of suspense.

He found his way to La Tournelle without any hesitation. There before
him was the wooden box, with its guichet open at last, and two stands
upon its ledge, on which were placed two huge leather-bound books.

Though Armand was nearly an hour before the appointed time, he saw when
he arrived a number of people standing round the guichet. Two soldiers
were there keeping guard and forcing the patient, long-suffering
inquirers to stand in a queue, each waiting