The street grew noisy with exclamation and conjecture, while those above, in the windows, screamed down for the rumors that flew from lip to lip. A little later another messenger arrived,--a waif of the slums, to whom the marks of poverty and vice had given the semblance of an incongruous manhood. The boy came romping down the street, bare-legged, disheveled, brandishing a knife. At times he flung up his hands and screamed in childish treble: "To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are being exterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! To the Abbaye!" Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in a sudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors. "The Abbaye!" Nicole cried in consternation. "And Dossonville! We must hurry there." A baker's wife, seeing them hastening on, cried: "Are you going to the Abbaye, citoyennes? Is there any danger?" "Not for us." "Wait, I'll join you." A cobbler made a fourth, then two apprentices from a cloth-merchant attached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. As they crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures of depravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlasses and pikes appeared, and from the panting throng shouts burst out: "Death to the traitors!" "Death to the betrayers of Longwy!" "Death to all aristocrats!" "Death to priests!" At the Abbaye they found the sanguinary remnants of the prisoners who, transferred from the Conciergerie, had been swept from the carts into the maw of the mob at the very gates that opened to shelter them. On the prison itself there had been as yet no attack. The mob, seeking vengeance on the priests, had swept on to the convent of Les Carmes. At the sight of the strewn corpses and the blood-bespattered pavements the baker's wife halted, crying: "I've seen enough; I'm going back." The cobbler hesitated, listening across the houses to the faint cries of the mob in the Rue Vaugirard. The apprentices sprang forward, while the newsboy exclaimed impudently: "Come on, comrades, we must see what's doing!" Nicole, who had come solely to assure herself of Dossonville's safety, likewise recoiling before the spectacle of butchery, was yet so impelled by the subtle, morbid fascination which such scenes exercise over the human mind, that without a thought she hastened on. The fishwife and the cobbler joined them; even the woman who had already started to retreat acceded to the common curiosity and returned, protesting: "It's too horrible! Turn back." "After all," the cobbler answered, "that's what the aristocrats would like to do to us!" "Aye, citoyen, you've hit it right!" "And the women?" "They'll leave them alone." "We'll see." About the convent a loose throng was churning, bristling with pikes and crudely fashioned spears. "Keep together," the cobbler cried, "and bear toward the wall!"