ake his place."

"Do as I bade you," cried the commissary, "and preserve absolute
secrecy. You understand!"

Athos shrugged his shoulders, and followed his guards silently, while M.
Bonacieux uttered lamentations enough to break the heart of a tiger.

They locked the mercer in the same dungeon where he had passed the
night, and left him to himself during the day. Bonacieux wept all day,
like a true mercer, not being at all a military man, as he himself
informed us. In the evening, about nine o'clock, at the moment he had
made up his mind to go to bed, he heard steps in his corridor. These
steps drew near to his dungeon, the door was thrown open, and the guards
appeared.

"Follow me," said an officer, who came up behind the guards.

"Follow you!" cried Bonacieux, "follow you at this hour! Where, my God?"

"Where we have orders to lead you."

"But that is not an answer."

"It is, nevertheless, the only one we can give."

"Ah, my God, my God!" murmured the poor mercer, "now, indeed, I am
lost!" And he followed the guards who came for him, mechanically and
without resistance.

He passed along the same corridor as before, crossed one court, then a
second side of a building; at length, at the gate of the entrance court
he found a carriage surrounded by four guards on horseback. They made
him enter this carriage, the officer placed himself by his side, the
door was locked, and they were left in a rolling prison. The carriage
was put in motion as slowly as a funeral car. Through the closely
fastened windows the prisoner could perceive the houses and the
pavement, that was all; but, true Parisian as he was, Bonacieux could
recognize every street by the milestones, the signs, and the lamps.
At the moment of arriving at St. Paul--the spot where such as were
condemned at the Bastille were executed--he was near fainting and
crossed himself twice. He thought the carriage was about to stop there.
The carriage, however, passed on.

Farther on, a still greater terror seized him on passing by the cemetery
of St. Jean, where state criminals were buried. One thing, however,
reassured him; he remembered that before they were buried their heads
were generally cut off, and he felt that his head was still on his
shoulders. But when he saw the carriage take the way to La Greve, when
he perceived the pointed roof of the Hotel de Ville, and the carriage
passed under the arcade, he believed it was over with him. He wished
to confess