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Meanwhile there was absolute solitude and profound silence. However, in
the course of a few hours, M. Emile Leroux--he himself has told the fact
to M. Versigny--heard on the other side of the wall on his right a sort
of curious knocking, spaced out and intermittent at irregular intervals.
He listened, and almost at the same moment on the other side of the wall
to his left a similar rapping responded. M. Emile Leroux,
enraptured--what a pleasure it was to hear a noise of some kind!--thought
of his colleagues, prisoners like himself, and cried out in a tremendous
voice, "Oh, oh! you are there also, you fellows!" He had scarcely uttered
this sentence when the door of his cell was opened with a creaking of
hinges and bolts; a man--the jailer--appeared in a great rage, and said
to him,--
"Hold your tongue!"
The Representative of the People, somewhat bewildered, asked for an
explanation.
"
Hold your tongue," replied the jailer, "or I will pitch you into a
dungeon."
This jailer spoke to the prisoner as the coup d'état spoke to the
nation.
M. Emile Leroux, with his persistent parliamentary habits, nevertheless
attempted to insist.
"
What!" said he, "can I not answer the signals which two of my colleagues
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