A long, dark, and narrow street, lighted by only two lanterns that flickered like glow-worms at each end of it, led me towards the Rue St. Antoine; and heedless of everything but the desire to leave Paris, I hurried along the deserted thoroughfares, with a swimming head and a sickened heart. The streets of Paris, like those of London, were then in a deplorable condition; unpaved, and encumbered by heaps of rubbish and cinders, the daily débris of the household, that festered in the stagnant gutters and watercourses, with the blood of the slaughter-booths, all matted and plashed by the feet of passengers, the hoofs of horses, and the wheels of waggons, carriages, and fiacres. Many of the tortuous and intricate alleys were literally dunghills. In the deep central gutters the swine revelled, and contested with kites and crows, dogs and beggars, for the offal of Paris. A French prince of the royal blood was killed in the city by a privileged pig of St. Anthony running between the legs of his horse; the splendid rider was brought prone into the mud with a broken neck. Moreover, in this good city every variety of slops and utensils were emptied nightly over the windows, with the same warning cry that was used in Scottish towns, and which never failed to strike the belated with alarm--_Gardez l'eau!_ I dashed on, my sword still unsheathed, leaping the chains at the ends of the greater thoroughfares; on past the Porte St. Antoine, unseen by the watch, unchallenged by the sentinels, and leaving the town behind me, hurried along a country road, which afterwards proved to be the way to Vincennes. At length the fields, the trees, and solitude were around me, and I paused to draw breath, and look back to where the vastness of Paris, like a wilderness of stone, lay buried in sleep, and overtopped by the huge dark towers of Notre Dame. Another black and frowning mass rose above the roofs and spires: it resembled the keep of a castle. I remembered the Bastille, that place of dreadful memories; and when recalling the rank of those I had so recently encountered, for one had been termed _chevalier_, and the other _monseigneur_, I felt more than one retrospective pang of anxiety or panic, and while endeavouring to imagine in what part of yonder wilderness my antagonist was lying, I turned my back upon it, and, with a glow of sad and fierce satisfaction, inhaled the free, pure breeze that came over the fallow fields. The sound of hoofs made me pause, listen eagerly, and then hurriedly to pierce a hedge and leave the road; for a mounted party, to my consternation too evidently the night patrol bent in pursuit of me, galloped along the highway. I had the ring of the discomfited chevalier, but I cared not to test its virtue on the lieutenant of police.