“So the President has gone? Ah, well..” Fandor hesitated; he must think of some other name. He noticed the visiting cards nailed to each press, indicating the owner. He read one of the names and repeated it:

“Well, then, could Justice Hubert see me – could he possibly? Will you ask him to let me see him for five minutes? “

“What name shall I say?”

“My name will not tell him anything. Please say it is with reference to the – er – Peyru case – and I come from Maître Tissot.”

“I will go and see,” said the messenger moving off.

While he was in sight Fandor walked up and down in his customary way, murmuring:

“Maître Tissot!... The Peyru case!... Go ahead, my good fellow! You will have a nice kind of reception down below there – with those made-up names.”

Some minutes later, the messenger returned to his post, prepared to inform the importunate young man that he could not possibly be received by Justice Hubert. He stopped short on the threshold: not a soul was to be seen!

“Wherever has that young man got to? Taken himself off most likely!... I expect he was one of those lawyer’s clerks – damn them! A right fool I should have looked if his Honour, Justice Hubert, had said he would receive him.”

With this reflection the messenger went back to his newspaper, not without having ascertained that it was four o’clock, and therefore he had still an hour to wait before he could have his coffee and cigar at the “Men of the Robe” bar.

Through the great windows of the Court of Assizes, carefully closed as they were, not a ray of moonlight filtered into the court room. And this obscurity lent an added terror to a silence as profound as the grave, a silence which, with the falling shades of night, assumed possession of the vast hall, where so many criminals had listened to the fatal sentence – the sentence of death.

When the Court had risen, the assistants had, as usual, proceeded to put the place in order; then the police sergeant had made his rounds, and had gone away, double locking the doors behind him. After this, the chamber had gradually sunk into complete silence: a repose which would be broken the following morning, when the bustling routine of the legal day commenced once more.

Little by little, too, the many and varied noises, which had echoed and re-echoed the whole day through in the galleries of the Palais de Justice, had died down, had sunk into silence.

The custodians had made their last round; the barristers had quit the robing-room; the poor wretches who had slunk in to warm themselves at the heaters in the halls had shuffled back to the cold street and the whistling blasts of the north wind. The immense building was entirely deserted.

A clock began to strike.