446 Les Miserables
have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door, and
you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the Pres-
ident’s chair.’ These words were mingled in his thoughts
with a vague memory of narrow corridors and dark stair-
cases which he had recently traversed.
The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had
arrived. He sought to collect his faculties, but could not. It is
chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for at-
taching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads
of thought snap within the brain. He was in the very place
where the judges deliberated and condemned. With stupid
tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apart-
ment, where so many lives had been broken, which was
soon to ring with his name, and which his fate was at that
moment traversing. He stared at the wall, then he looked at
himself, wondering that it should be that chamber and that
it should be he.
He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was
worn out by the jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of
it. It seemed to him that he felt nothing.
He approached a black frame which was suspended on
the wall, and which contained, under glass, an ancient au-
tograph letter of Jean Nicolas Pache, mayor of Paris and
minister, and dated, through an error, no doubt, the 9th of
June, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded to the
commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest
by them. Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that
moment, and who had watched him, would have imagined,
doubtless, that this letter struck him as very curious, for he