he jail of La Force to the Conciergerie, and each man had a
"Salad-basket" to himself.

Nine-tenths of my readers, ay, and nine-tenths of the remaining tenth,
are certainly ignorant of the vast difference of meaning in the words
incriminated, suspected, accused, and committed for trial--jail, house
of detention, and penitentiary; and they may be surprised to learn here
that it involves all our criminal procedure, of which a clear and brief
outline will presently be sketched, as much for their information as for
the elucidation of this history. However, when it is said that the first
van contained Jacques Collin and the second Lucien, who in a few hours
had fallen from the summit of social splendor to the depths of a prison
cell, curiosity will for the moment be satisfied.

The conduct of the two accomplices was characteristic; Lucien de
Rubempre shrank back to avoid the gaze of the passers-by, who looked at
the grated window of the gloomy and fateful vehicle on its road along
the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue du Martroi to reach the quay and the
Arch of Saint-Jean, the way, at that time, across the Place de l'Hotel
de Ville. This archway now forms the entrance gate to the residence of
the Prefet de la Seine in the huge municipal palace. The daring convict,
on the contrary, stuck his face against the barred grating, between
the officer and the gendarme, who, sure of their van, were chatting
together.

The great days of July 1830, and the tremendous storm that then burst,
have so completely wiped out the memory of all previous events, and
politics so entirely absorbed the French during the last six months
of that year, that no one remembers--or a few scarcely remember--the
various private, judicial, and financial catastrophes, strange as they
were, which, forming the annual flood of Parisian curiosity, were not
lacking during the first six months of the year. It is, therefore,
needful to mention how Paris was, for the moment, excited by the news of
the arrest of a Spanish priest, discovered in a courtesan's house,
and that of the elegant Lucien de Rubempre, who had been engaged to
Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu, taken on the highroad to Italy,
close to the little village of Grez. Both were charged as being
concerned in a murder, of which the profits were stated at seven
millions of francs; and for some days the scandal of this trial
preponderated over the absorbing importance of the last elections held
under Charle