Page:Marquis de Sade - Adelaide of Brunswick.djvu/75

 they were unable to open it. Gropingly they made their way along the passageway in the darkness. They had gone about two hundred steps, when they heard some groans.

"Heavens, where are we?" they said to each other. "Is this the place where the victims are sacrificed? What hope do we have of ever getting out of here alive?"

Adelaide stopped at one of the walls in the hope of questioning one of the victims, but she could not make herself heard; the wall was too thick.

They were so frightened by now that they almost ran along the passage. At the end of what seemed like hours, but which was only a few minutes they could see a light in the distance and a ray of hope mixed with terror came to them. They hurried their steps; but at the end of the passageway they found an iron gate. The noise they made shaking it brought a man who opened it and then locked it again. But who was this man? They trembled with fright on recognizing him. It was Stolbach. It was this monster who had delivered them from Schinders for money only to have them caught in a new trap.

"Place these women in the dungeons," he said to a man who turned out to be the hermit. "They have come to be judged by the secret court." In a few seconds they were both locked in dungeons.

The place where Adelaide and Bathilda were at that moment was one of those secret courts in Germany which had grown up during the tyranny of the small sovereigns who had used the courts to accomplish their purposes and to second them in despotism.

The two women had not been long in their cells when Stolbach, who had become their guardian again, came to tell them to prepare themselves to be judged.

"You have cruelly deceived us," said Adelaide to him. "You helped us in order to have us fall again into a trap."

"Certainly," said the man, "the first imprisonment was only temporary. We can have you die legally only in this one."

"And by what reason," asked Bathilda, "have you made us pay so dearly for liberty which we do not have?"

"Oh, all the abuses of power are usual things for us. Do you think that we would exercise such a vile trade, in trying to get