Between Two Thieves

Instructors' Building, with an iron-grated gate at either end, and a row of seven cool stone cells on either side, apartments favourable to salutary reflection, containing within a space of ten square feet a stool, and a window boarded to the upper panes. In one of these Pupil 130, guilty of an offence of homicidal violence against the person of a schoolfellow, was subjected to cold storage, pending the Military Court Martial of Inquiry which would follow the sentence pronounced by the Civil Director-in-Chief of Studies. Pending both, the offender, deprived of his brass-handled hanger and the esteem of his instructors, nourished upon bread and water?Seine water in those unenlightened days, and Seme water but grudgingly dashed with the thin red vinegary ration-wine?had nothing to do but sit astraddle on the three-legged stool, gripping the wooden edge between his thighs, and remember?and remember. . . . And see, painted on the semi-obscurity of the dimly- lighted cell, de Moulny's plume of drab-coloured fair hair crowning the high, knobbed, reflective forehead; the stony-blue eyes looking watchfully, intolerantly, from their narrow eye-orbits ; the heavy blockish nose; the pouting underlip; the long, obstinate, projecting chin; the ugly, powerful, attractive young face moving watchfully from side to side on the column of the muscular neck, in the hollow at the base of which the first light curly hairs began to grow and mass together, spreading downwards over th...