"As if that would do any good," shrugged the jailor. "You are mad. I will send you down below, with the lunatics, like that old abbé who keeps babbling about a trifle that we would fancy if we would release him. Bah! Fool! Hobbites do not eat trifle; we feast on the bûches de Yoûle."
And so, the following morning, a guard arrived and escorted Samouard down below, into an even more unpleasant cell. The bed there was in such bad taste that it must have been dwarf-work. Out of the cell came a stench, a foul reek as if the filth unnameable of a hundred Gauloises-littered bidets were hoarded therein.
Day followed day, month followed month, and year followed year, in a dreary succession of hours that suffered no measurement beyond the daily arrival of the jailer, who broke the darkness with a light that wavered like a noisome exhalation of decay, a lumière de cadavre, a light that illuminated nothing. Every day, it was the same hard baguette with jam, and the same glass of chocolat for Samouard; and they had very evidently been prepared by inferior chefs. No answer did the jailer ever give to Samouard's pleas to speak to the governor.
This routine was admittedly interrupted somewhat by the arrival of an inspector of prisons, who asked Gamgès some pointed questions, to which the latter gave equally pointed answers, concluding his eloquent response with "Just ask M. de Villefaramir, the steuard du roi. Par Érou, did I mention that the wine here was made in a pissetoire, and not of the better ones, at that?"
