For a long time, no doubt, they were terrible.  In the days of the old Parlement, of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., the accused were, no doubt, flung pell-mell into a low room underneath the old gateway.  The prisons were among the crimes of 1789, and it is enough only to see the cells where the Queen and Madame Elizabeth were incarcerated to conceive a horror of old judicial proceedings.

In our day, though philanthropy has brought incalculable mischief on society, it has produced some good for the individual.  It is to Napoleon that we owe our Criminal Code; and this, even more than the Civil Code—­which still urgently needs reform on some points—­will remain one of the greatest monuments of his short reign.  This new view of criminal law put an end to a perfect abyss of misery.  Indeed, it may be said that, apart from the terrible moral torture which men of the better classes must suffer when they find themselves in the power of the law, the action of that power is simple and mild to a degree that would hardly be expected.  Suspected or accused criminals are certainly not lodged as if they were at home; but every necessary is supplied to them in the prisons of Paris.  Besides, the burden of feelings that weighs on them deprives the details of daily life of their customary value.  It is never the body that suffers.  The mind is in such a phase of violence that every form of discomfort or of brutal treatment, if such there were, would be easily endured in such a frame of mind.  And it must be admitted that an innocent man is quickly released, especially in Paris.

So Lucien, on entering his cell, saw an exact reproduction of the first room he had occupied in Paris at the Hotel Cluny.  A bed to compare with those in the worst furnished apartments of the Quartier Latin, straw chairs with the bottoms out, a table and a few utensils, compose the furniture of such a room, in which two accused prisoners are not unfrequently placed together when they are quiet in their ways, and their misdeeds are not crimes of violence, but such as forgery or bankruptcy.

This resemblance between his starting-point, in the days of his innocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham, was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the unhappy fellow melted into tears.  For four hours he wept, as rigid in appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow of his pride, smarting in each separate I that exists in an ambitious man—­a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a favorite.  Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.

Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar bear in his cage.  He carefully examined the door and assured himself that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it.  He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light came, and he said to himself, “I am safe enough!”