The Man with the Black Feather. Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux

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: "Was n'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 should n'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