the subject from that eternal one
of the colonnade of the Louvre, to which the architectural Dr. Perrault
was shackling him.

When high noon arrived, Mademoiselle Scuderi had to go to Madame
Montansier, so the visit to Rene Cardillac had to be put off till the
following day. But the young man was always present to her mind, and a
species of dim remembrance seemed to be trying to arise in the depths
of her being that she had, somehow and somewhen, seen that face and
features before. Troubled dreams disturbed her broken slumbers. It
seemed to her that she had acted thoughtlessly, and delayed culpably to
take hold of the hands which the unfortunate man was holding out to her
for help--in fact, as if it had depended on her to prevent some
atrocious crime. As soon as it was fairly light, she had herself
dressed, and set off to the goldsmith's with the jewels in her hand.

A crowd was streaming towards the Rue Nicaise (where Cardillac lived),
trooping together at the door, shouting, raging, surging, striving to
storm into the house, kept back with difficulty by the Marechaussee,
who were guarding the place. Amid the wild distracted uproar, voices
were heard crying, "Tear him in pieces! Drag him limb from limb, the
accursed murderer!" At length Desgrais came up with a number of his
men, and formed a lane through the thickest of the crowd. The door flew
open, and a man, loaded with irons, was brought out, and marched off
amid the most frightful imprecations of the raging populace. At the
moment when Mademoiselle Scuderi, half dead with terror and gloomy
foreboding, caught sight of him, a piercing shriek of lamentation
struck upon her ears. "Go forward!" she cried to the coachman, and he,
with a clever, rapid turn of his horses, scattered the thick masses
of the crowd aside, and pulled up close to Rene Cardillac's door.
Desgrais was there, and at his feet a young girl, beautiful as the day,
half-dressed, with dishevelled hair, and wild grief, inconsolable
despair in her face, holding his knees embraced, and crying in tones of
the bitterest and profoundest anguish, "He is innocent! he is
innocent!" Desgrais and his men tried in vain to shake her off, and
raise her from the ground, till at length a rough, powerful fellow,
gripping her arms with his strong hands, dragged her away from Desgrais
by sheer force. Stumbling awkwardly, he let the girl go, and she went
rolling down the stone steps, and lay like one dead on the pavement.