of well known "trouble-bourgeoises" and compared them, without prejudice, with bronze, marble and even with august folk in the flesh. In default of the golden letters illustrating the monuments of civic gratitude, the name of the prisoner gleamed in white letters on the breast of each portrait. This inscription seemed to pillory and tattoo with a red-hot iron even the poor effigy of the subject. On the back of the card figured the description, the sobriquet, the place of birth, the number of the record, and the term of commitment.
Laurent was amused at the decoys and the deceptions in these faces. Certain of the satyr-like masks would have been equally becoming to the most venerated of magistrates and to the chastest of chaste youths.
Following an attack upon a young farm-girl by six peasants from Pouderlee, he frequently went to the commonplace cabaret from which the scamps had rushed to gratify their lust. He was fond of the dilapidated road with its radish-beds, its mangy woods, its hillocks, its border of slender trees barked and notched, without doubt by the same Jacks-of-all-trades who occasionally set upon a less passive victim.
Thanks to his album of patibulary celebrities he recognized one of the heroes of this escapade in a young farmhand of eighteen, condemned by the Court of Assizes, but later freed by the royal pardon. If the excellent likeness of the photograph of this jailbird, one of those to which Paridael determinedly returned, had disconcerted him by the almost seraphic candor of its features, how much more inoffensive did he appear in flesh and bone! There was nothing sinister or even suspicious in the symbol of his soul. A
