At La Force this farce had been all the more successful in the first instance because the head of the “safety” force—an abbreviation of the title “Head of the brigade of the guardians of public safety”—Bibi-Lupin, who had long since taken Jacques Collin into custody at Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, had been sent on special business into the country, and his deputy was a man who hoped to succeed him, but to whom the convict was unknown.
Bibi-Lupin, himself formerly a convict, and a comrade of Jacques Collin’s on the hulks, was his personal enemy. This hostility had its rise in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always got the upper hand, and in the supremacy over his fellow-prisoners which Trompe-la-Mort had always assumed. And then, for ten years now, Jacques Collin had been the ruling providence of released convicts in Paris, their head, their adviser, and their banker, and consequently Bibi-Lupin’s antagonist.
Thus, though placed in solitary confinement, he trusted to the intelligent and unreserved devotion of Asie, his right hand, and perhaps, too, to Paccard, his left hand, who, as he flattered himself, might return to his allegiance when once that thrifty subaltern had safely bestowed the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs that he had stolen. This was the reason why his attention had been so superhumanly alert all along the road. And, strange to say! his hopes were about to be amply fulfilled.
The two solid side-walls of the archway were covered, to a height of six feet, with a permanent dado of mud formed of the splashes from the gutter; for, in those days, the foot passenger had no protection from the constant traffic of vehicles and from what was called the kicking of the carts, but curbstones placed upright at intervals, and much ground away by the naves of the wheels. More than once a heavy truck had crushed a heedless foot-passenger under that arch-way. Such indeed Paris remained in many districts and till long after. This circumstance may give some idea of the narrowness of the Saint-Jean gate and the ease with which it could be blocked. If a cab should be coming through from the Place de Greve while a costermonger-woman was pushing her little truck of apples in from the Rue du Martroi, a third vehicle of any kind produced difficulties. The foot-passengers fled in alarm, seeking a corner-stone to protect them from the old-fashioned axles, which had attained such prominence that a law was passed at last to reduce their length.
When the prison van came in, this passage was blocked by a market woman with a costermonger’s vegetable cart—one of a type which is all the more strange because specimens still exist in Paris in spite of the increasing number of green-grocers’ shops. She was so thoroughly a street hawker that a Sergeant de Ville, if that particular class of police had been then in existence, would have allowed her to ply her trade without inspecting her permit, in spite of a sinister countenance that reeked of crime. Her head, wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the bristles of a wild boar. Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the sun, dust, and mud. Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown. And what an apron! a plaster would have been less filthy. This moving and fetid rag must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away. Those hands had gleaned a hundred harvest fields. Either the woman had returned from a German witches’ Sabbath, or she had come out of a mendicity asylum. But what eyes! what audacious intelligence, what repressed vitality when the magnetic flash of her look and of Jacques Collin’s met to exchange a thought!
“Get out of the way, you old vermin-trap!” cried the postilion in harsh tones.
“Mind you don’t crush me, you hangman’s apprentice!” she retorted. “Your cartful is not worth as much as mine.”
And by trying to squeeze in between two corner-stones to make way, the hawker managed to block the passage long enough to achieve her purpose.
“Oh! Asie!” said Jacques Collin to himself, at once recognizing his accomplice. “Then all is well.”
The post-boy was still exchanging amenities with Asie, and vehicles were collecting in the Rue du Martroi.