“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 Palais de Justice stands, and forms the corner of the quay.

These four towers and these walls are shrouded in the black winding sheet which, in Paris, falls on every facade to the north.  About half-way along the quay at a gloomy archway we see the beginning of the private houses which were built in consequence of the construction of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV.  The Place Royale was a replica of the Place Dauphine.  The style of architecture is the same, of brick with binding courses of hewn stone.  This archway and the Rue de Harlay are the limit line of the Palais de Justice on the west.  Formerly the Prefecture de Police, once the residence of the Presidents of Parlement, was a dependency of the Palace.  The Court of Exchequer and Court of Subsidies completed the Supreme Court of Justice, the Sovereign’s Court.  It will be seen that before the Revolution the Palace enjoyed that isolation which now again is aimed at.

This block, this island of residences and official buildings, in their midst the Sainte-Chapelle—­that priceless jewel of Saint-Louis’ chaplet—­is the sanctuary of Paris, its holy place, its sacred ark.