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The bed itself, with all the appurtenances of palliasse, mattresses, etc., was of far later date, and looked most incongruously comfortable; the casements, too, with their little diamond-shaped panes and iron binding, had given way to the modern heterodoxy of the sash-window.

I agreed to her proposal, and she took me to a small closet where I found a straw palliasse on four pieces of wood. "Do you call this a bed, my child?" "I have no other, sir." "Then I do not want it, and you shall not have the crown." "Did you intend undressing yourself?" "Of course." "What an idea! There are no sheets." "Do you sleep with your clothes on?" "Oh, no!"

But it doesn't matter; we took him with us when we heard that he was dying of hunger and sickness in a cellar." The visitors could not help quivering with pity. Ambrogio was the elder by some fifteen years; and now, though scarcely sixty, he was already a ruin, consumed by fever, his legs so wasted that he spent his days on his palliasse without ever going out.

Before leading him to his cell, they dumped their inanimate prisoner on a chair in the porter's lodge.... The porter brought vinegar. They rubbed Butler-Vinson's temples with it. A jailor slapped his hands. In vain! The prisoner showed no signs of life! "You had better take him to his cell," advised the porter. "Perhaps he will come to his senses if laid on his palliasse?

There was not an article of furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the stove where the charcoal was still smoking and a half-emptied palliasse on which the mother had fallen, suckling her last-born, a babe but three months old.

"The door! Bust it! Quick, Bud! Bust it, an' stand clear!" For answer there was a crash on the woodwork outside. He waited for no more. With a wild rush through the blinding, choking fog of smoke he charged down the room. With all his might he flung the blazing palliasse from his scorched hands. He had no idea of the direction in which it went.

Anxious, irritable, his nerves well-nigh on the rack, he nevertheless crossed the guard-room with a firm step and entered the cell where the prisoner was still lying upon the palliasse, as he had been all along, and still presenting that naked piece of shoulder through the hole in his shirt. "He has been like this the best part of the day," Hebert said with a shrug of the shoulders.

In any case, run for the medical officer." The jailors, who could make nothing of their prisoner's mysterious condition, transported him to cell 27. They laid him on his palliasse. "Lieutenant Servin?" "Commandant?" "Will you help me to reduce these papers to order? It is half-past eleven: I want to go to breakfast!"

That night he slept on a palliasse of straw, with a pillow consisting of a thin bolster propped on his outer clothes. Three very yellow blankets made up the tally of comfort. And the whole was spread out on the floor of a room in which four other men were sleeping noisily. After breakfast he paid his bill, and, procuring his horse, prepared for departure.

"By what right should I object? and why must I suppose myself affronted by her presence? am I so sure that I am any better than she?" He established himself for the night in an old broken-down armchair, declaring he should sleep excellently in it. Athenaïs lay on the mattress. Brotteaux stretched himself on the palliasse and blew out the candle.