"By Gervaise-Perrette Popinot."
"Very good; sit down yonder and await your turn."
Jacques sat down as the man in black bade him do, and waited.
Five or six persons of varying age, sex, and feature were waiting like himself, and as they had arrived before him their turns naturally came before his. Some of them went out alone,—they were the ones, doubtless, against whom no sufficient evidence was adduced,—while others went out accompanied by an exempt, or by two of the provost's guards. Jacques Aubry envied the fortune of these latter, for they were being taken to the Châtelet, to which he was so anxious to be admitted.
At last the name of Jacques Aubry, student, was called. Jacques Aubry instantly rose and rushed into the magistrate's office as joyously as if he were on his way to the most agreeable of entertainments.
There were two men in the lieutenant criminal's sanctum; one taller, thinner, and more forbidding than he in the antechamber, which Jacques Aubry would have deemed impossible five minutes earlier: this was the clerk. The other was short, fat, coarse, with a cheerful eye, a smiling mouth, and a jovial expression generally: this was the magistrate.
Aubry's smile and his met, and the student was quite ready to grasp his hand, so strongly conscious was he of the existence of a bond of sympathy between them.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the lieutenant criminal, as he caught the student's eye.
"Faith, that is true, messire," the student rejoined.
"You seem a jolly dog," said the magistrate. "Come, master knave, take a chair and sit you down."