‘I am not so certain of that,’ said Marie. ‘My eyes have deceived me, or else I have seen, each time we passed a lamp, a figure following the coach, and crouching against the walls and houses. See! there it is again!’
As she spoke, she wiped away the condensed breath upon the windows with her mantle, and called Gaudin’s attention to the street.
‘There!’ she cried; ‘I still see the same figure—tall and dark—moving after us. I cannot discern the features.’
‘It is but some late passenger,’ said Gaudin, ‘who is keeping near our carriage for the safety of an escort. You must recollect we are in the centre of the cut-purse students.’
The coach turned round the corner of the Rue des Mathurins as he spoke, crossing the Rue St. Jacques, and halfway along the street stopped at a porte-cochère, which was lighted up with unusual brightness. The door was opened, and as Gaudin assisted the Marchioness to alight, both cast a searching glance along the narrow street in either direction; but excepting a lackey attached to the Hôtel de Cluny, where they now got down, not a person was visible.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE ORGY AT THE HÔTEL DE CLUNY
The Hôtel de Cluny, into the court-yard of which Gaudin led the Marchioness on alighting from the carriage, is not only a building of great interest at the present day, but was equally celebrated in the Middle Ages, and so intimately connected with ancient Paris, even in the time of the Romans, that a very brief description of it may not be altogether out of place.
Any one who cares to visit it may arrive at its gates by proceeding up the Rue de la Harpe from the river, at the Pont St. Michel, and turning to the left in the Rue des Mathurins. But just before this point the Palais des Thermes will be passed—the remains of a vast Roman edifice which once occupied a large area of ground in the Quartier Latin. Of this building the hall is still in tolerable preservation; and two stages of subterraneous passages may be traced to the length of about one hundred feet, where they are choked up with ruins. There is, however, existing proof that they formed a perfect communication between the Palais des Thermes and the Convent des Mathurins, at the other extremity of the street.
Upon the foundations of the Roman building, towards the close of the fifteenth century, Jacques d’Amboise, one of the nine brothers of Louis XII.’s minister who bore that name, built the present edifice. The ground had been purchased more than a century previous by Pierre de Chaslus, an abbe of the celebrated order of Cluny, a portion of the Roman palace then being sufficiently perfect to reside in; and that became the residence of the abbes of Cluny when their affairs called them to Paris.
The new building was raised upon this site, and with the materials of the ancient structure, so that at many parts of the hôtel the graceful architecture of the moyen âge may be seen rising from the foundation-walls of Roman masonry. This is not, however, the only part to interest the artist or the antiquary. The entire edifice, built at an epoch of architectural revolution, is a mixture of the last inspirations of the Gothic style with the first dawn of the renaissance.