his room, backing on the governor's
office, is divided from it by a thick wall in strong masonry, and the
other side of it is formed by a wall seven or eight feet thick, which
supports one end of the immense _Salle des Pas-Perdus_. It is entered
through the first door in the long dark passage in which the eye
loses itself when looking from the middle of the vaulted gateway. This
ill-omened room is lighted by a funnel, barred by a formidable grating,
and hardly perceptible on going into the Conciergerie yard, for it has
been pierced in the narrow space between the office window close to the
railing of the gateway, and the place where the office clerk sits--a den
like a cupboard contrived by the architect at the end of the entrance
court.

This position accounts for the fact that the room thus enclosed
between four immensely thick walls should have been devoted, when the
Conciergerie was reconstituted, to this terrible and funereal service.
Escape is impossible. The passage, leading to the cells for solitary
confinement and to the women's quarters, faces the stove where gendarmes
and warders are always collected together. The air-hole, the only outlet
to the open air, is nine feet above the floor, and looks out on the
first court, which is guarded by sentries at the outer gate. No human
power can make any impression on the walls. Besides, a man sentenced to
death is at once secured in a straitwaistcoat, a garment which precludes
all use of the hands; he is chained by one foot to his camp bed, and he
has a fellow prisoner to watch and attend on him. The room is paved with
thick flags, and the light is so dim that it is hard to see anything.

It is impossible not to feel chilled to the marrow on going in,
even now, though for sixteen years the cell has never been used,
in consequence of the changes effected in Paris in the treatment of
criminals under sentence. Imagine the guilty man there with his remorse
for company, in silence and darkness, two elements of horror, and you
will wonder how he ever failed to go mad. What a nature must that
be whose temper can resist such treatment, with the added misery of
enforced idleness and inaction.

And yet Theodore Calvi, a Corsican, now twenty-seven years of age,
muffled, as it were, in a shroud of absolute reserve, had for two months
held out against the effects of this dungeon and the insidious chatter
of the prisoner placed to entrap him.

These were the strange circumstances