'La journee sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my
day also, my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will
have an end; that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so
long as I thought at all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching,
when thinking in any shape would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,
to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts
ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the
administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its
inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and
liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting
themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a
century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the
French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied
to those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to
approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself
had direct personal cognisance of various cases in which bribery had
been applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that
perhaps Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular
passport through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation
been of somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should
have been found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness
of newborn vigor, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular
irritation it excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one
particular minister, new to the possession of power, anxious to
distinguish himself, proud of his creative functions within the range