What a disillusion here in these towers with a little plaster and paint they had made the office of the Director of Records, the store-room of the prison doctor. One could carouse here where once the hangman held sway. One could laugh where only the cries of the tortured were heard. Now there would have been nothing unusual about this visit to the Conciergerie but for a very extraordinary incident which occurred after the party had left the torture chamber. The incident was weird and inexplicable, and while I read M. Longuet’s own description of it, I confess I found it impossible to believe. Therefore I went to the Chief Warden, who had shown the party round the prison, and asked for his account of the incident. He gave it to me in the following words: Sir, the affair passed as usual, and the lady, the two gentlemen and I visited the kitchen of St. Louis, which is now used as a store-house for plaster. We proceeded towards the dungeon of Marie Antoinette, which is now the chapel. On the way I showed them the crucifix, before which she prayed before mounting the cart which is now in the Director’s room. I told the man with the green umbrella that we had been obliged to transfer the Queen’s arm-chair to the Director’s room, because the English visitors had carried away pieces from it as souvenirs. We had by this time arrived at the end of the Street of Paris—you know the street that leads from Paris to the Conciergerie. We passed through that frightfully dark passage, where we found the grating behind which they cut off the hair of the women before execution. You know that it is the very same grating. It is a passage where never a ray of sunlight penetrates. Marie Antoinette walked through that passage on the day of her death. It is there that the old Conciergerie stands just as it was hundreds of years ago. I was describing the Street of Paris, when suddenly the man with the green umbrella cried out in a voice so unlike the previous voice, so strangely that the other gentleman and lady looked startled: “Zounds, it is the walk of the Straw Dealers.” He said it in a weird tone and his whole attitude was changed. He used the expression, zounds, twice. I told him he was mistaken, that the walk of the Straw Dealers is what we call to-day the Street of Paris. He answered me in the same strange voice: “Zounds, you cannot tell me that! I have lain there on that straw like the others!” I remarked to him, smilingly, although not without a feeling of fear, that no one had lain on that straw in the alley of the Straw Dealers for more than two hundred years. He was just about to answer me when his wife intervened. “What are you saying, Théophraste?” said she. “Do you wish to teach Monsieur his business? You have never been to the Conciergerie before.” Then he said in his natural voice, the voice by which I had known him at first: “That is so, I have never been here before.”