The felons and their escort disappeared; Ned, dwelling where he had paused, came to himself presently with a shock, as if out of a dream. On an immediate impulse he turned into the prison yard, and mounted a shallow flight of steps leading up to a great studded door that was pierced by an open wicket. Looking through this, he saw the figure he sought receding down a dim, long vestibule; and at the moment he was faced by a turnkey. “What do you here?” exclaimed the man harshly. “That Jules is a fine porter!” “I thought I saw one I knew pass in.” “It is like enough. They have many of them a large acquaintance”--and he offered to slam the wicket in the intruder’s face. Ned jingled, and produced his “tip.” “That is another question,” said the man. “Now,” said Ned, “is the name of that last prisoner that entered Basile de St Denys?” “I know nothing of the _de_. What sort of citizen art thou? But, otherwise--yes.” “And what is he accused of?” “A common enough matter: forging assignats.” CHAPTER XIII. Citoyenne Théroigne had not, it is to be supposed, the wit of a Mohl, or the tact of a Recamier; but her sensuous and long-practised beauty so vindicated her sins of omission in these respects as to procure her reunions a social distinction than which none more catholic was accorded the _salons_ of a later period. At her rooms in the Rue de Rohan she held, and had long held, weekly Sunday _séances_, of a quasi-political character, at which revolutionary propagandists of such opposed principles as Mirabeau, Brissot, Pétion were in turn, or out of it, to be met. Thither sometimes came Philip of Orleans, with his sick, affable smile; thither Desmoulins, galvanic and stuttering, the “attorney-general to the lantern”; thither the poet Joseph Chénier; thither the younger Sieyes, eager to sniff the incense exhaled to his less accessible brother, to whose exalted virtues Théroigne, by some queer freak of contrariety, consistently and reverently testified. To what earlier condescensions on her part were due her present political intimacies it need not here be questioned. One form of sympathetic largesse is part of the necessary equipment of women of a naturally assimilative character. She had adaptability; for four years her face and figure had brought her a succession of ardent ministers to it. Thus, nourished on the unconsidered mental pabulum of manifold intellects, she was become an omniparous vessel, brazen and beautiful--emitting such a medley of discordant sounds as had once the window bells, to Ned, in the “landlust” of her native village. Yet, through all, whatever her inconsequent show of principles, detestation of a social system to the abuse of which she attributed her early downfall abided within her unwaveringly, and induced her to those deeds of violence that, in the end, alienated from her all those of her once familiars to whom Reason figured as something higher than the goddess of licence.