But now, on this particular evening, conscious of something in my breast that overcrowed the passionless voice of philosophy, I felt myself uplifted and translated--an essence impressionable to no influence that was meaner than divine. “And who knows,” I said to myself, as we were summoned from the yard, “but that Quatremains-Quatrepattes might have pronounced Carinne to be the bright star in my horoscope?” “Not so fast, citizen,” growled Cabochon, who stood, list in hand, at the door. “Rest content,” said I; “I am never in a hurry.” “_Par exemple!_ you grow a little rusty, perhaps, for a notable actor. It is well, then, that you have an engagement at last.” “To perform? And where, M. Cabochon?” “In the Palais de Justice. That is a theatre with a fine box, citizen; and the verdict of those that sit in it is generally favourable--to the public.” CHAPTER XII. THE MOUSE-TRAP. Was I so very small? I had the honour of a tumbril all to myself on my journey to the Conciergerie, and I swear that I could have thought I filled it. But Mademoiselle de Lâge was the pretty white heifer that had caused me to puff out my sides in emulation of her large nobility--me, yes, of whom she would have said, as the bull of the frog, “_Il n’était pas gros en tout comme un œuf_.” Now I was travelling probably to my grave; yet the exaltation of that interview still dwelt with me, and I thought often of some words that had once been uttered by a certain Casimir Bertrand: “To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back! What could kings wish for better?” We came down upon the sullen prison by way of the Pont au Change and the Quay d’Horloge, and drew up at a door on the river-side. I saw a couple of turrets, with nightcap roofs, stretch themselves, as if yawning, above me. I saw in a wide angle of the gloomy block of buildings, where the bridge discharged itself upon the quay, a vast heap of newly thrown-up soil where some excavations were being conducted; and from the mound a sort of crane or scaffold, sinisterly suggestive of a guillotine surmounting a trench dug for its dead, stood out against a falling crimson sky. The river hummed in its course; above a green spot on the embankment wall a cloud of dancing midges seemed to boil upwards like steam from a caldron. Everything suggested to me the _mise en scène_ of a rehearsing tragedy, and then promptly I was haled, like an inanimate “property,” into the under-stage of that dark “theatre of varieties.” Messieurs the jailers, it appeared, were at their supper, and would not for the moment be bothered with me. A gush of light and a violent voice issued from a door to one side of a stony vestibule: “Run the rascal into La Souricière, and be damned to him!”