yonder by the wall of Saint Eustache. A detachment of gendarmes had just
blown out the brains of five unhappy fellows caught at a barricade in
the Rue Greneta. The five corpses were lying on the footway, at a spot
where he thought he could now distinguish a heap of rosy radishes. He
himself had escaped being shot merely because the policemen only carried
swords. They took him to a neighbouring police station and gave the
officer in charge a scrap of paper, on which were these words written
in pencil: "Taken with blood-stained hands. Very dangerous." Then he had
been dragged from station to station till the morning came. The scrap of
paper accompanied him wherever he went. He was manacled and guarded as
though he were a raving madman. At the station in the Rue de la Lingerie
some tipsy soldiers wanted to shoot him; and they had already lighted a
lantern with that object when the order arrived for the prisoners to be
taken to the depot of the Prefecture of Police. Two days afterwards he
found himself in a casemate of the fort of Bicetre. Ever since then he
had been suffering from hunger. He had felt hungry in the casemate, and
the pangs of hunger had never since left him. A hundred men were pent in
the depths of that cellar-like dungeon, where, scarce able to breathe,
they devoured the few mouthfuls of bread that were thrown to them, like
so many captive wild beasts.

When Florent was brought before an investigating magistrate, without
anyone to defend him, and without any evidence being adduced, he was
accused of belonging to a secret society; and when he swore that this
was untrue, the magistrate produced the scrap of paper from amongst the
documents before him: "Taken with blood-stained hands. Very dangerous."
That was quite sufficient. He was condemned to transportation. Six weeks
afterwards, one January night, a gaoler awoke him and locked him up in
a courtyard with more than four hundred other prisoners. An hour later
this first detachment started for the pontoons and exile, handcuffed and