The yard of the Conciergerie ends at the quai between the Tour d’Argent and the Tour Bonbec; thus the distance between them exactly shows from the outside the width of the plot of ground.  The corridor called the Galerie de Saint-Louis, which extends from the Galerie Marchande to the Courts of Appeals and the Tour Bonbec—­in which, it is said, Saint-Louis’ room still exists—­may enable the curious to estimate the depths of the yard, as it is of the same length.  Thus the dark cells and the private rooms are under the Galerie Marchande.  And Queen Marie Antoinette, whose dungeon was under the present cells, was conducted to the presence of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which held its sittings in the place where the Court of Appeals now performs its solemn functions, up a horrible flight of steps, now never used, in the very thickness of the wall on which the Galerie Marchande is built.

One side of the prison-yard—­that on which the Hall of Saint-Louis forms the first floor—­displays a long row of Gothic columns, between which the architects of I know not what period have built up two floors of cells to accommodate as many prisoners as possible, by choking the capitals, the arches, and the vaults of this magnificent cloister with plaster, barred loopholes, and partitions.  Under the room known as the Cabinet de Saint-Louis, in the Tour Bonbec, there is a spiral stair leading to these dens.  This degradation of one of the immemorial buildings of France is hideous to behold.

From the height at which Lucien was standing he saw this cloister, and the details of the building that joins the two towers, in sharp perspective; before him were the pointed caps of the towers.  He stood amazed; his suicide was postponed to his admiration.  The phenomena of hallucination are in these days so fully recognized by the medical faculty that this mirage of the senses, this strange illusion of the mind is beyond dispute.  A man under the stress of a feeling which by its intensity has become a monomania, often finds himself in the frame of mind to which opium, hasheesh, or the protoxyde of azote might have brought him.  Spectres appear, phantoms and dreams take shape, things of the past live again as they once were.  What was but an image of the brain becomes a moving or a living object.  Science is now beginning to believe that under the action of a paroxysm of passion the blood rushes to the brain, and that such congestion has the terrible effects of a dream in a waking state, so averse are we to regard thought as a physical and generative force. (See Louis Lambert.)

Lucien saw the building in all its pristine beauty; the columns were new, slender and bright; Saint-Louis’ Palace rose before him as it had once appeared; he admired its Babylonian proportions and Oriental fancy.  He took this exquisite vision as a poetic farewell from civilized creation.  While making his arrangements to die, he wondered how this marvel of architecture could exist in Paris so utterly unknown.  He was two Luciens—­one Lucien the poet, wandering through the Middle Ages under the vaults and the turrets of Saint-Louis, the other Lucien ready for suicide.