As the afternoon advanced, he left the little room over the shop and descended into the kitchen. He did not eat the dinner that le Bossu had set out for him; he had gone fasting too often of late to feel the loss of regular meals, and he could not eat with relish food for which he could not pay. He went out through the shop, creating no little excitement in the neighboring houses as he crossed the court and entered the Rue St. Antoine. He had been closely housed since Saturday, and freedom was sweet. He stood a moment looking about at the groups of chattering townspeople, and then he turned his steps toward the Garden of the Récollets. It was nearly five o’clock and the shadows were lengthening on the west side of the streets, and he heard the church bells ringing as though there were peace and good-will on earth. A rag-picker was at work at the mouth of an alley, some dirty children were playing in the kennel, and a boy with a basket of figs on his head was crying the price as he went along. It was an ordinary street scene, busy and noisy, and d’Aguesseau brushed against a Jesuit priest as he walked on past the Cathedral of St. Castor. Full of his own gloomy thoughts he went from street to street, and was only aroused at last by finding himself nearly opposite a tavern--which bore the sign of the Golden Cup--and in the midst of an uproar. The doors and windows of the public house were crowded, and a rabble came up the street with jeers and cries and laughter. D’Aguesseau drew back into the shelter of a friendly doorway and waited the approach of the _canaille_, and it was not long before the excitement was explained. The street was not very wide, and the crowds seemed to choke it up as they advanced; and a little ahead of the rabble came a chain of prisoners driven along by the whips of their guards and pelted with stones and offal by the spectators. The criminals were fastened in pairs by short chains, each having a ring in the centre; then a long heavy chain was passed through these rings, thus securing the pairs in a long double column. There were fifty men thus fastened; twenty-five on one side, and twenty-five on the other, and between, the cruel iron chain; each man bearing a weight of a hundred and fifty pounds, though they were of all ages and conditions, from the beardless boy to the veteran bowed with years. It was a gang going to the galleys at Marseilles, and there were thieves, murderers, and Huguenots; the latter especially and fatally distinguished by red-jackets that they might be the mark of every stone and every insult of the bystanders. Like the exposure of the corpses of damned persons, the chain was a moral lesson for the people, and especially for the recalcitrants.