walls sweating tears, the
coarseness of the jailers and of the food--inevitable accessories of
the drama; but it is not unnecessary to explain here that these
exaggerations exist only on the stage, and only make lawyers and judges
smile, as well as those who visit prisons out of curiosity, or who come
to study them.

For a long time, no doubt, they were terrible. In the days of the old
Parlement, of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., the accused were, no doubt,
flung pell-mell into a low room underneath the old gateway. The prisons
were among the crimes of 1789, and it is enough only to see the cells
where the Queen and Madame Elizabeth were incarcerated to conceive a
horror of old judicial proceedings.

In our day, though philanthropy has brought incalculable mischief on
society, it has produced some good for the individual. It is to Napoleon
that we owe our Criminal Code; and this, even more than the Civil
Code--which still urgently needs reform on some points--will remain one
of the greatest monuments of his short reign. This new view of criminal
law put an end to a perfect abyss of misery. Indeed, it may be said
that, apart from the terrible moral torture which men of the better
classes must suffer when they find themselves in the power of the law,
the action of that power is simple and mild to a degree that would
hardly be expected. Suspected or accused criminals are certainly not
lodged as if they were at home; but every necessary is supplied to them
in the prisons of Paris. Besides, the burden of feelings that weighs on
them deprives the details of daily life of their customary value. It
is never the body that suffers. The mind is in such a phase of violence
that every form of discomfort or of brutal treatment, if such there
were, would be easily endured in such a frame of mind. And it must be
admitted that an innocent man is quickly released, especially in Paris.

So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first
room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny. A bed to compare with
those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw
chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose
the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not
unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and
their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or
bankruptcy.

This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his
in