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
career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of
the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against
these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a
speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides
complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of taking a
step to prevent them--for that justification is written in that
ante-room, like a preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to those
enacted on the Place de la Greve.

At this moment Colonel Chabert was sitting among these men--men with
coarse faces, clothed in the horrible livery of misery, and silent at