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 her 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: