“Baptiste, produce the passports,” said the young Duchess with a smile.
“And with what crime is Monsieur de Rubempre charged?” asked Clotilde, whom the Duchess wished to see safe in the carriage.
“Of being accessory to a robbery and murder,” replied the sergeant of gendarmes.
Baptiste lifted Mademoiselle de Grandlieu into the chaise in a dead faint.
By midnight Lucien was entering La Force, a prison situated between the Rue Payenne and the Rue des Ballets, where he was placed in solitary confinement.
The Abbe Carlos Herrera was also there, having been arrested that evening.
THE END OF EVIL WAYS
At six o’clock next morning two vehicles with postilions, prison vans, called in the vigorous language of the populace, paniers a salade, came out of La Force to drive to the Conciergerie by the Palais de Justice.
Few loafers in Paris can have failed to meet this prison cell on wheels; still, though most stories are written for Parisian readers, strangers will no doubt be satisfied to have a description of this formidable machine. Who knows? A police of Russia, Germany, or Austria, the legal body of countries to whom the “Salad-basket” is an unknown machine, may profit by it; and in several foreign countries there can be no doubt that an imitation of this vehicle would be a boon to prisoners.
This ignominious conveyance, yellow-bodied, on high wheels, and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments. In front is a box-seat, with leather cushions and an apron. This is the free seat of the van, and accommodates a sheriff’s officer and a gendarme. A strong iron trellis, reaching to the top, separates this sort of cab-front from the back division, in which there are two wooden seats placed sideways, as in an omnibus, on which the prisoners sit. They get in by a step behind and a door, with no window. The nickname of Salad-basket arose from the fact that the vehicle was originally made entirely of lattice, and the prisoners were shaken in it just as a salad is shaken to dry it.