Chapter 1

M. THEOPHRASTUS LONGUET DESIRES TO IMPROVE
HIS MIND AND VISITS HISTORICAL MONUMENTS

M. Theophrastus Longuet was not alone when he rang the bell of that
old-time palace prison, the Conciergerie: he was accompanied by his
wife Marceline, a very pretty woman, uncommonly fair for a Frenchwoman,
of an admirable figure, and by M. Adolphe Lecamus, his best friend.

The door, pierced by a small barred peephole, turned heavily on its
hinges, as a prison door should; the warder, who acts as guide to the
prison, dangling a bunch of great old-fashioned keys in his hand,
surveyed the party with official gloom, and asked Theophrastus for
his permit. Theophrastus had procured it that very morning at the
Prefecture of Police; he held it out with the air of a citizen assured
of his rights, and regarded his friend Adolphe with a look of triumph.

He admired his friend almost as much as he admired his wife. Not
that Adolphe was exactly a handsome man; but he wore an air of force
and vigour; and there was nothing in the world which Theophrastus,
the timidest man in Paris, rated more highly than force and vigour.
That broad and bulging brow (whereas his own was narrow and high),
those level and thick eyebrows, for the most part raised a trifle to
express contempt of others and self-confidence, that piercing glance
(whereas his own pale-blue eyes blinked behind the spectacles of the
short-sighted), that big nose, haughtily arched, those lips surmounted
by a brown, curving moustache, that strong, square chin; in a word, all
that virile antithesis to his own grotesque, flabby-cheeked face, was
the perpetual object of his silent admiration. Besides, Adolphe had
been Post-Office Inspector in Tunis: he had "crossed the sea."

Theophrastus had only crossed the river Seine. No one can pretend that
that is a real crossing.

The guide set the party in motion; then he said:

"You are French?"

Theophrastus stopped short in the middle of the court.

"Do we look like Germans?" he said with a confident smile, for he was
quite sure that he was French.

"It's the first time I ever remember French people coming to visit the
Conciergerie. As a rule French people don't visit anything," said the
guide with his air of official gloom; and he went on.

"It is wrong of them. The monuments of the Past are the Book of
History," said Theophrastus sententiously; and he stopped short to look
proudly at his wife and Adolphe, for he found the saying fine.

They were not listening to him; and as he followed the guide, he went
on in a confidential tone, "I am an old Parisian myself; and if I have
waited till to-day to visit the monuments of the Past, it was because
my business--I was a manufacturer of rubber stamps right up to last
week--did not give me the leisure to do it till the hour I retired from
it. That hour has struck; and I am going to improve my mind." And with
an air of decision he struck the time-old pavement with the ferule of
his green umbrella.

They went through a little door and a large wicket, down some steps,
and found themselves in the Guard-room.

They were silent, abandoning themselves entirely to their reflections.
They were doing all they could to induce these old walls, which
recalled so prodigious a history, to leave a lasting impression on
their minds. They were not insensible brutes. While the guide conducted
them over Cæsar's tower, or Silver tower, or Bon Bec tower, they told
themselves vaguely that for more than a thousand years there had been
in them illustrious prisoners whose very names they had forgotten.
Marceline thought of Marie Antoinette, the Princess Elizabeth, and the
little Dauphin, and also of the waxwork guards who watch over the Royal
Family in museums. In spirit therefore she was in the Temple while she
was in body visiting the Conciergerie. But she did not suspect this; so
she was quite happy.

As they descended the Silver tower, where the only relict of the
Middle Ages they had found was an old gentleman on a stool in front
of a roll-top desk, classifying the documents relating to political
prisoners under the Third Republic, they came once more into the
Guard-room on their way to Bon Bec tower.

Theophrastus, who took a pride in showing himself well-informed,
said to the guide: "Wasn't it here that the Girondins had their last
meal? You might show us exactly where the table was and where Camille
Desmoulins sat. I always look upon Camille Desmoulins as a personal
friend of mine."

"So do I," said Marceline with a somewhat superior air.

Adolphe jeered at them. He asserted that Camille Desmoulins was not a
Girondin. Theophrastus was annoyed, and so was Marceline. When Adolphe
went on to assert that Camille Desmoulins was a Cordelier, a friend
of Danton, and one of the instigators of the September massacres, she
denied it.

"He was nothing of the kind," she said firmly. "If he had been, Lucie
would never have married him."

Adolphe did not press the point, but when they came into the
Torture-chamber in Bon Bec tower, he pretended to be immensely
interested by the labels on the drawers round the walls, on which were
printed "Hops," "Cinnamon," "Senna."

"This was the Torture-chamber; they have turned it into a dispensary,"
said the guide in gruff explanation.

"They have done right. It is more humane," said Theophrastus
sententiously.

"No doubt; but it's very much less impressive," said Adolphe coldly.

At once Marceline agreed with him...

One was not impressed at all... They had been expecting something very
different... This was not at all what they had looked for.

But when they came on to the Clock platform, their feelings underwent a
change. The formidable aspect of those feudal towers, the last relics
of the old Frankish monarchy, troubles for awhile the spirit of even
the most ignorant. This thousand-year-old prison has witnessed so many
magnificent death-agonies and hidden such distant and such legendary
despairs that it seems that one only has to penetrate its depths to
find sitting in some obscure corner, damp and fatal, the tragic history
of Paris, as immortal as those walls. That is why, with a little
plaster, flooring, and paint, they have made there the office of the
Director of the Conciergerie and that of the Recorder; they have put
the ink-spiller in the place once occupied by the executioner. It is,
as Theophrastus says, more humane.

None the less, since, as Adolphe affirmed, it is less impressive,
that visit of the 16th of last June threatened to leave on the minds
of the three friends nothing but the passing memory of a complete
disillusion when there happened an incident so unheard of and so
curiously fantastic that I considered it absolutely necessary, after
reading Theophrastus Longuet's account of it in his memoirs, to go to
the Conciergerie and cross-examine the guide himself.

I found him a stolid fellow, officially gloomy, but with his memory of
the events of Theophrastus' visit perfectly clear.

At my questions he lost his air of gloom, and said with some animation,
"Everything was going quite as usual, sir; and I had just shown the two
gentlemen and the lady the kitchens of St. Louis--where we keep the
whitewash. We were on our way to the cell of Marie Antoinette, which is
now a little chapel. The figure of Christ before which she must have
prayed is now in the Director's office--"

"Yes, yes; let's get to the facts!" I interrupted.

"We're just coming to them. I was telling the gentleman with the green
umbrella that we had been compelled to put the Queen's armchair in
the Director's office because the English were carrying away all the
stuffing of it in their purses--"

"Oh, cut out the English!" I said with some impatience.

He looked at me with an injured air and went on: "But I must tell you
what I was saying to the gentleman with the green umbrella when he
interrupted me in such a strange tone that the other gentleman and the
lady cried out together, 'What's the matter, Theophrastus? I never
heard you speak like that before! _I shouldn't have recognised your
voice!_'"

"Ah! and what was he saying to you?"

"We had come just to the end of Paris Street--you know the passage we
call Paris Street at the Conciergerie?"

"Yes, yes: get on!"

"We were at the top of that dreadful black passage where the grating is
behind which they used to cut off the women's hair before guillotining
them. It's the original grating, you know."

"Yes, yes: get on!"

"It's a passage into which a ray of sunlight never penetrates. You know
that Marie Antoinette went to her death down that passage?"

"Yes, yes: cut out Marie Antoinette!"

"There you have the old Conciergerie in all its horror... Then the
gentleman with the green umbrella said to me, '_Zounds! It's Straw
Alley!_'"

"He said that? Are you sure? Did he really say '_Zounds_'?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, after all, there's nothing very remarkable in his saying,
'_Zounds! It's Straw Alley!_'"

"But wait a bit, sir," said the guide with yet more animation. "I
answered that he was wrong, that Straw Alley was what we to-day
call 'Paris Street.' He replied in that strange voice: '_Zounds!
Are you going to teach me about Straw Alley? Why, I've slept on the
straw there, like the others!_' I said laughing, though I felt a bit
uncomfortable, that no one had slept in Straw Alley for more than two
hundred years."

"And what did he say to that?"

"He was going to answer when his wife interfered and said: 'What are
you talking about, Theophrastus? Are you going to teach the guide his
business when you've never been to the Conciergerie before in your
life?' Then he said, but in his natural voice, the voice in which he
had been speaking since they came in: 'That's true. I've never been to
the Conciergerie in my life.'"

"What did he do then?"

"Nothing. I could not explain the incident, and I thought it all over,
when something stranger still happened. We had visited the Queen's
cell, and Robespierre's cell, and the chapel of the Girondins, and
that little door through which the prisoners of September went to get
massacred in the court; and we had come back into Paris Street. On
the left-hand side of it there's a little staircase which no one ever
goes down, because it leads to the cellars; and the only thing to see
in the cellars is the eternal night which reigns there. The door at
the bottom of this is made of iron bars, a grating--perhaps a thousand
years old, or even more. The gentleman they called Adolphe was walking
with the lady towards the door of the Guard-room, when without a word
the gentleman with the green umbrella ran down the little staircase and
called up from the bottom of it in that strange voice I was telling you
about:

"'Hi! Where are you going to? _It's this way!_'

"The other gentleman, the lady, and myself stopped dead as if we
had been turned to stone. I must tell you, sir, that his voice was
perfectly awful; and there was nothing in his appearance to make one
expect such a voice. I ran, in spite of myself as it were, to the top
of the staircase. The man with the green umbrella gave me a withering
glance. Truly I was thunderstruck, turned to stone and thunderstruck;
and when he shouted to me, 'Open this grating!' I don't know how I
found the strength to rush down the stairs and open it. Then, when the
grating was opened, he plunged into the night of the cellars. Where did
he go? How did he find his way? That basement of the Conciergerie is
plunged in a terrible darkness which nothing has broken for ages and
ages."

"Didn't you try to stop him?" I said sharply.

"He had gone too far; and I hadn't the strength to stop him. _The man
with the green umbrella just gave me orders_; and I had to obey him.
And we stood there for a quarter of an hour, half out of our wits: it
was so odd. And his wife talked, and his friend talked, and I talked;
and we said nothing of any use; and we stared into the darkness till
our eyes ached. Suddenly we heard his voice--not his first voice, but
his second voice, the awful voice--and I was so overcome, I had to
hang on to the bars of the door.

"'Is that you, _Simon the Auvergnat_?' he cried.

"I didn't answer anything; and as he went past me, I fancied he put
a scrap of paper into his breast pocket. He sprang up the staircase
three steps at a time; and we went up after him. He did not offer any
explanation; and I simply ran to open the door of the prison for them.
I wanted to see their backs. When the wicket was opened and the man
with the green umbrella was crossing the threshold, he said, for no
reason that I could see:

"'_We must avoid the wheel._'

"There was no carriage passing."