Come through and drink some wine wi’ me!
For yesterday I was your prisoner,
But now the night I am set free.”
—Archie o’ Cawfield.
The long day of suspense was closing into evening before Gilbert, consumed with anxiety at the Hôtel des Etats-Généraux, knew that Madame d’Espaze had not belied her word. From the packet which was brought to him about nine o’clock fell out a scented note.
“Take the accompanying order and present it at La Force without loss of time. It will do all you wish.—
C. d’E.”
Dismissing at the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, for prudence sake, the fiacre which had brought him so far, Château-Foix hurried thence eastwards on foot. His head was in a whirl; he had not time to think how he should greet his cousin, and was glad of it, but threaded his way quickly through the animation of the Rue Saint-Antoine, till he saw on his left the opening of the little Rue des Ballets. Narrow, roughly paved, sloping down to a central gutter with its trickling stream, it ran its thirty paces up to the sombre facade of the Hôtel de la Force. And Gilbert went towards the prison in the July dusk, with no premonition of the September afternoon when the gutter over which he strode should run with a darker stream, and the narrow door which faced him open to let out, into the brief hell of axes and laughter, victim after victim. . . . His thoughts were all of Louis, of Louis immured in that dark mass which rose, its high roof pierced with tiny dormer windows, behind the lower range of the entrance. The sight of La Force and all that it stood for had exorcised for the moment any feelings of his own. He cast a hasty glance to his left, where the building ran along the Rue du Roi de Sicile—lately rebaptized as the Rue des Droits de l’Homme—and accosted the sentry in his box by the door.
Some parley with this individual resulted in his being admitted, and, following a jailor through two successive guichets, he found himself in the bureau of the prison. Months afterwards he realised that this place must have been the summary tribunal chamber of so many agonies. Bault, the concierge, was fetched from his supper, registers were brought out and searched, the order of release was entered, not without comment, and, as far as formalities were concerned, Louis was a free man again. The concierge, at heart not ill-natured, and further softened by the hundred livres which the Marquis had just slipped into his hand, remarked that it would be as well to let the prisoner out by the little door giving into the Rue des Droits de l’Homme, and not by the chief entrance, whence he might possibly be espied by passers in the Rue Saint Antoine. An aristocrat leaving La Force might chance to be a displeasing sight to the good patriots of the Faubourg, and from what he, Bault, remembered of the citizen Saint-Ermay, there was no disguising the fact that he was an aristocrat.
Gilbert thanked him, and, since he should not return that way, was allowed to follow the guichetier instead of remaining where he was, as he had expected do. His guide crossed a small courtyard, went through yet a third guichet, emerged into a larger court, and turning, ascended a staircase.