er purpose.

"Oh! Asie!" said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his
accomplice. "Then all is well."

The post-boy was still exchanging amenities with Asie, and vehicles were
collecting in the Rue du Martroi.

"Look out, there--Pecaire fermati. Souni la--Vedrem," shrieked old Asie,
with the Red-Indian intonations peculiar to these female costermongers,
who disfigure their words in such a way that they are transformed into a
sort onomatopoeia incomprehensible to any but Parisians.

In the confusion in the alley, and among the outcries of all the waiting
drivers, no one paid any heed to this wild yell, which might have been
the woman's usual cry. But this gibberish, intelligible to Jacques
Collin, sent to his ear in a mongrel language of their own--a mixture of
bad Italian and Provencal--this important news:

"Your poor boy is nabbed. I am here to keep an eye on you. We shall meet
again."

In the midst of his joy at having thus triumphed over the police, for
he hoped to be able to keep up communications, Jacques Collin had a blow
which might have killed any other man.

"Lucien in custody!" said he to himself.

He almost fainted. This news was to him more terrible than the rejection
of his appeal could have been if he had been condemned to death.

Now that both the prison vans are rolling along the Quai, the interest
of this story requires that I should add a few words about the
Conciergerie, while they are making their way thither. The Conciergerie,
a historical name--a terrible name,--a still more terrible thing, is
inseparable from the Revolutions of France, and especially those of
Paris. It has known most of our great criminals. But if it is the most
interesting of the buildings of Paris, it is also the least known--least
known to persons of the upper classes; still, in spite of the interest
of this historical digression, it should be as short as the journey of
the prison vans.

What Parisian, what foreigner, or what provincial can have failed to
observe the gloomy and mysterious features of the Quai des Lunettes--a
structure of black walls flanked by three round towers with conical
roofs, two of them almost touching each other? This quay, beginning at
the Pont du Change, ends at the Pont Neuf. A square tower--the Clock
Tower, or Tour de l'Horloge, whence the signal was given for the
massacre of Saint-Bartholomew--a tower almost as tall as that of
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, shows where the P