I could scarcely credit my eyes, as I read and re-read this infamous announcement; but there it stood, and in the crowd that poured incessantly to and from the door, I saw the success that attended the traffic. A ragged knot were gathered around the window, eagerly gazing at something, which, by their exclamations, seemed to claim all their admiration. I pressed forward to see what it was, and beheld a miniature guillotine, which, turned by a wheel, was employed to chop the meat for sausages. This it was that formed the great object of attraction, even to those to whom the prototype had grown flat and uninteresting.
Disgusted as I was by this shocking sight, I stood watching all that went forward within with a strange interest. It was a scene of incessant bustle and movement; for now, as one o’clock drew nigh, various dinners were being prepared for the prisoners, while parties of their friends were assembling inside. Of these latter there seemed persons of every rank and condition; some, dressed in all the brilliancy of the mode; others, whose garments bespoke direst poverty. There were women, too, whose costume emulated the classic drapery of the ancients, and who displayed, in their looped togas, no niggard share of their forms; while others, in shabby mourning, sat in obscure corners, not noticing the scene before them, nor noticed themselves. A strange equipage, with two horses extravagantly bedizened with rosettes and bouquets, stood at the door; and, as I looked, a pale, haggard-looking man, whose foppery in dress contrasted oddly with his careworn expression, hurried from the shop and sprang into the carriage. In doing so, a pocket-book fell from his pocket. I took it up; but as I did so, the carriage was already away, and far beyond my power to overtake it.
Without stopping to examine my prize, or hesitating for a second, I entered the restaurant, and asked for M. Boivin.
‘Give your orders to me, boy,’ said a man busily at work behind the counter.
‘My business is with himself,’ said I stoutly.
‘Then you ‘ll have to wait with some patience,’ said he sneeringly.
‘I can do so,’ was my answer, and I sat down in the shop.
I might have been half an hour thus seated, when an enormously fat man, with a huge bonnet rouge on his head, entered from an inner room, and passing close to where I was, caught sight of me.
‘Who are you, sirrah—what brings you here?’
‘I want to speak with M. Bouvin.’