Those hands had gleaned a hundred harvest fields.
Either the woman had returned from a German witches’ Sabbath, or she had come out of a mendicity asylum.
But what eyes! what audacious intelligence, what repressed vitality when the magnetic flash of her look and of Jacques Collin’s met to exchange a thought!
“Get out of the way, you old vermin-trap!” cried the postilion in harsh tones.
“Mind you don’t crush me, you hangman’s apprentice!” she retorted. “Your cartful is not worth as much as mine.”
And by trying to squeeze in between two corner-stones to make way, the hawker managed to block the passage long enough to achieve her purpose.
“Oh! Asie!” said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his accomplice. “Then all is well.”
The post-boy was still exchanging amenities with Asie, and vehicles were collecting in the Rue du Martroi.
“Look out, there — Pecaire fermati.
Souni la — Vedrem,” shrieked old Asie, with the Red–Indian intonations peculiar to these female costermongers, who disfigure their words in such a way that they are transformed into a sort onomatopoeia incomprehensible to any but Parisians.
In the confusion in the alley, and among the outcries of all the waiting drivers, no one paid any heed to this wild yell, which might have been the woman’s usual cry.
But this gibberish, intelligible to Jacques Collin, sent to his ear in a mongrel language of their own — a mixture of bad Italian and Provencal — this important news: “Your poor boy is nabbed. I am here to keep an eye on you.
We shall meet again.”
In the midst of his joy at having thus triumphed over the police, for he hoped to be able to keep up communications, Jacques Collin had a blow which might have killed any other man.
“Lucien in custody!” said he to himself.
He almost fainted.
This news was to him more terrible than the rejection of his appeal could have been if he had been condemned to death.
Now that both the prison vans are rolling along the Quai, the interest of this story requires that I should add a few words about the Conciergerie, while they are making their way thither.
The Conciergerie, a historical name — a terrible name — a still more terrible thing, is inseparable from the Revolutions of France, and especially those of Paris.
It has known most of our great criminals.
But if it is the most interesting of the buildings of Paris, it is also the least known — least known to persons of the upper classes; still, in spite of the interest of this historical digression, it should be as short as the journey of the prison vans.
What Parisian, what foreigner, or what provincial can have failed to observe the gloomy and mysterious features of the Quai des Lunettes — a structure of black walls flanked by three round towers with conical roofs, two of them almost touching each other?
This quay, beginning at the Pont du Change, ends at the Pont Neuf.
A square tower — the Clock Tower, or Tour de l’Horloge, whence the signal was given for the massacre of Saint–Bartholomew — a tower almost as tall as that of Saint–Jacques de la Boucherie, shows where the Palais de Justice stands, and forms the corner of the quay.
These four towers and these walls are shrouded in the black winding sheet which, in Paris, falls on every facade to the north.
About half-way along the quay at a gloomy archway we see the beginning of the private houses which were built in consequence of the construction of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV.
The Place Royale was a replica of the Place Dauphine.
The style of architecture is the same, of brick with binding courses of hewn stone.
This archway and the Rue de Harlay are the limit line of the Palais de Justice on the west.
Formerly the Prefecture de Police, once the residence of the Presidents of Parlement, was a dependency of the Palace. The Court of Exchequer and Court of Subsidies completed the Supreme Court of Justice, the Sovereign’s Court.
It will be seen that before the Revolution the Palace enjoyed that isolation which now again is aimed at.
This block, this island of residences and official buildings, in their midst the Sainte–Chapelle — that priceless jewel of Saint–Louis’ chaplet — is the sanctuary of Paris, its holy place, its sacred ark.
For one thing, this island was at first the whole of the city, for the plot now forming the Place Dauphine was a meadow attached to the Royal demesne, where stood a stamping mill for coining money.
Hence the name of Rue de la Monnaie — the street leading to the Pont Neuf.
Hence, too, the name of one of the round towers — the middle one — called the Tour d’Argent, which would seem to show that money was originally coined there.
The famous mill, to be seen marked in old maps of Paris, may very likely be more recent than the time when money was coined in the Palace itself, and was erected, no doubt, for the practice of improved methods in the art of coining.
The first tower, hardly detached from the Tour d’Argent, is the Tour de Montgomery; the third, and smallest, but the best preserved of the three, for it still has its battlements, is the Tour Bonbec.
The Sainte–Chapelle and its four towers — counting the clock tower as one — clearly define the precincts; or, as a surveyor would say, the perimeter of the Palace, as it was from the time of the Merovingians till the accession of the first race of Valois; but to us, as a result of certain alterations, this Palace is more especially representative of the period of Saint–Louis.
Charles V. was the first to give the Palace up to the Parlement, then a new institution, and went to reside in the famous Hotel Saint–Pol, under the protection of the Bastille.
The Palais des Tournelles was subsequently erected backing on to the Hotel Saint–Pol.
Thus, under the later Valois, the kings came back from the Bastille to the Louvre, which had been their first stronghold. The original residence of the French kings, the Palace of Saint–Louis, which has preserved the designation of Le Palais, to indicate the Palace of palaces, is entirely buried under the Palais de Justice; it forms the cellars, for it was built, like the Cathedral, in the Seine, and with such care that the highest floods in the river scarcely cover the lowest steps.
The Quai de l’Horloge covers, twenty feet below the surface, its foundations of a thousand years old.
Carriages run on the level of the capitals of the solid columns under these towers, and formerly their appearance must have harmonized with the elegance of the Palace, and have had a picturesque effect over the water, since to this day those towers vie in height with the loftiest buildings in Paris.
As we look down on this vast capital from the lantern of the Pantheon, the Palace with the Sainte–Chapelle is still the most monumental of many monumental buildings.
The home of our kings, over which you tread as you pace the immense hall known as the Salle des Pas–Perdus, was a miracle of architecture; and it is so still to the intelligent eye of the poet who happens to study it when inspecting the Conciergerie.
Alas! for the Conciergerie has invaded the home of kings.
One’s heart bleeds to see the way in which cells, cupboards, corridors, warders’ rooms, and halls devoid of light or air, have been hewn out of that beautiful structure in which Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque — the three phases of ancient art — were harmonized in one building by the architecture of the twelfth century.
This palace is a monumental history of France in the earliest times, just as Blois is that of a later period.
As at Blois you may admire in a single courtyard the chateau of the Counts of Blois, that of Louis XII., that of Francis I., that of Gaston; so at the Conciergerie you will find within the same precincts the stamp of the early races, and, in the Sainte–Chapelle, the architecture of Saint–Louis.
Municipal Council (to you I speak), if you bestow millions, get a poet or two to assist your architects if you wish to save the cradle of Paris, the cradle of kings, while endeavoring to endow Paris and the Supreme Court with a palace worthy of France.