And now we tore up a dark, endless boulevard, even as a shifty maggot in a pit of darkness. But surely this was the murderer’s Paris, here lived the fathers and grandfathers of Apaches, here were born the daughters of the drinkers of blood and the sons of the mothers of crime. It stretched never-ending between lamps fixed at astronomical distances, and on each side tall naked trees thrashed the shadows of very high black walls. They hid from the world, the people of this boulevard of the high walls, and who shall say that they had no reason to hide? And then, do you know, a lion leapt out of the night, a huge lion that was black as sin and crouched for prey in the centre way between five lanes of darkness made even darker by confused strings of light. And as we breathed a prayer in thanks for our deliverance from the lion of darkness trams crawled near us and stayed a while, and tram, at the impulse of a vice peculiarly continental, was joined to tram and crawled away; while we, having regained our breath, came beneath the shadow of a terrible wall. It was the wall of a castle, a fortress, a something satanically majestic. This, I thought, is another of Carlyle’s mistakes, this is no less than the Bastille skulking in these parts until such time as the Camelots du Roy shall have left the kindergarten and can crown the duc d’Orleans King of France. Far above our laboured passage glowed a long, long row of small windows faintly lit, and it seemed to me that they were striped with bars of iron. And there was a great gate of iron, and a black soldier with a beastly bayonet to his rifle, and an old woman with a great brown parcel under her arm, waiting. The clever little Citroën stopped. It is tired, I thought, and will go on later.... “_Eh, numéro quarante-neuf, Boulevard Pierre Abel?_” the taxi-driver threw at me reproachfully, and I got out, and I stared up at the great fortress which towered above me like a beast with a row of unclean eyes about his forehead, and the rain whipped my face. “_C’est un prison?_” “_Mais oui, monsieur. Le Paradis._” The pavement was broad, of mud and asphalt. The prison towered on our right, filling the sky with darkness--but for those distant, terrible windows. The rain whipped down, stinging like little animals. Nearby one forlorn lamp lit the putrefying colours of the advertisements circling a _lavabo_. What, I wondered and wondered, could Iris be doing here? Facing me across the broad pavement of mud and asphalt was a great gate which had once been brown, lit by a lamp on which had once been inscribed the number of the Nursing Home. Iris was here. Were we, then, always to meet in darkness, Iris and I? She was here, and perhaps, I thought, on the other side of her is a Morgue or an Asylum. A yard or so from the great door there was let into the high wall a small door inscribed _Concierge_. I was startled at the clatter made by the bell. A nun stood in the dim doorway. CHAPTER SIX: THE RED LIGHTS I