! Be humane,
generous, philanthropical, and a lawyer, and you are bound to
be cheated! There is a piece of business that will cost me two
thousand-franc notes!"

Some time after receiving this letter, Derville went to the Palais de
Justice in search of a pleader to whom he wished to speak, and who was
employed in the Police Court. As chance would have it, Derville went
into Court Number 6 at the moment when the Presiding Magistrate was
sentencing one Hyacinthe to two months' imprisonment as a vagabond, and
subsequently to be taken to the Mendicity House of Detention, a sentence
which, by magistrates' law, is equivalent to perpetual imprisonment. On
hearing the name of Hyacinthe, Derville looked at the deliquent, sitting
between two _gendarmes_ on the bench for the accused, and recognized in
the condemned man his false Colonel Chabert.

The old soldier was placid, motionless, almost absentminded. In spite
of his rags, in spite of the misery stamped on his countenance, it
gave evidence of noble pride. His eye had a stoical expression which no
magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man has fallen
into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity, a matter
of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero.

When the veteran was taken back to the lock-up, to be removed later
with the batch of vagabonds at that moment at the bar, Derville availed
himself of the privilege accorded to lawyers of going wherever they
please in the Courts, and followed him to the lock-up, where he stood
scrutinizing him for some minutes, as well as the curious crew of
beggars among whom he found himself. The passage to the lock-up at that
moment afforded one of those spectacles which, unfortunately, neither
legislators, nor philanthropists, nor painters, nor writers come to
study. Like all the laboratories of the law, this ante-room is a dark
and malodorous place; along the walls runs a wooden seat, blackened
by the constant presence there of the wretches who come to this
meeting-place of every form of social squalor, where not one of them is
missing.

A poet might say that the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful
sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot on that
plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner
where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which
justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a
care