f
the carts, but curbstones placed upright at intervals, and much ground
away by the naves of the wheels. More than once a heavy truck had
crushed a heedless foot-passenger under that arch-way. Such indeed Paris
remained in many districts and till long after. This circumstance may
give some idea of the narrowness of the Saint-Jean gate and the ease
with which it could be blocked. If a cab should be coming through from
the Place de Greve while a costermonger-woman was pushing her little
truck of apples in from the Rue du Martroi, a third vehicle of any kind
produced difficulties. The foot-passengers fled in alarm, seeking a
corner-stone to protect them from the old-fashioned axles, which had
attained such prominence that a law was passed at last to reduce their
length.

When the prison van came in, this passage was blocked by a market woman
with a costermonger's vegetable cart--one of a type which is all the
more strange because specimens still exist in Paris in spite of the
increasing number of green-grocers' shops. She was so thoroughly a
street hawker that a Sergeant de Ville, if that particular class of
police had been then in existence, would have allowed her to ply her
trade without inspecting her permit, in spite of a sinister countenance
that reeked of crime. Her head, wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked
cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the
bristles of a wild boar. Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and
her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the
sun, dust, and mud. Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though
they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown. And what an
apron! a plaster would have been less filthy. This moving and fetid rag
must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away. Those
hands had gleaned a hundred harvest fields. Either the woman had
returned from a German witches' Sabbath, or she had come out of a
mendicity asylum. But what eyes! what audacious intelligence, what
repressed vitality when the magnetic flash of her look and of Jacques
Collin's met to exchange a thought!

"Get out of the way, you old vermin-trap!" cried the postilion in harsh
tones.

"Mind you don't crush me, you hangman's apprentice!" she retorted. "Your
cartful is not worth as much as mine."

And by trying to squeeze in between two corner-stones to make way, the
hawker managed to block the passage long enough to achieve h