The churches were the freest from it. To come out of

the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,

dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and

begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the

nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever

shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with

occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious

drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling

in the sun one day.

In Marseilles that day there was a villainous

prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the

obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected

light as it could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men,

a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a

draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of draughts,

made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two

or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats

and other unseen vermin, in addition to the seen vermin, the two men.

It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars

fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be

always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.

There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom

of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.

Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with

his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the

opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to

admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on

negligently, for his greater ease.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the

imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all

deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,

so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air

was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,

the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have

kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the

Indian ocean.

The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked

his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one

shoulder, and growled, 'To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that

never shines in here!'




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