"It's a passage into which a ray of sunlight never penetrates. You know that Marie Antoinette went to her death down that passage?" "Yes, yes: cut out Marie Antoinette!" "There you have the old Conciergerie in all its horror... Then the gentleman with the green umbrella said to me, '_Zounds! It's Straw Alley!_'" "He said that? Are you sure? Did he really say '_Zounds_'?" "Yes, sir." "Well, after all, there's nothing very remarkable in his saying, '_Zounds! It's Straw Alley!_'" "But wait a bit, sir," said the guide with yet more animation. "I answered that he was wrong, that Straw Alley was what we to-day call 'Paris Street.' He replied in that strange voice: '_Zounds! Are you going to teach me about Straw Alley? Why, I've slept on the straw there, like the others!_' I said laughing, though I felt a bit uncomfortable, that no one had slept in Straw Alley for more than two hundred years." "And what did he say to that?" "He was going to answer when his wife interfered and said: 'What are you talking about, Theophrastus? Are you going to teach the guide his business when you've never been to the Conciergerie before in your life?' Then he said, but in his natural voice, the voice in which he had been speaking since they came in: 'That's true. I've never been to the Conciergerie in my life.'" "What did he do then?" "Nothing. I could not explain the incident, and I thought it all over, when something stranger still happened. We had visited the Queen's cell, and Robespierre's cell, and the chapel of the Girondins, and that little door through which the prisoners of September went to get massacred in the court; and we had come back into Paris Street. On the left-hand side of it there's a little staircase which no one ever goes down, because it leads to the cellars; and the only thing to see in the cellars is the eternal night which reigns there. The door at the bottom of this is made of iron bars, a grating--perhaps a thousand years old, or even more. The gentleman they called Adolphe was walking with the lady towards the door of the Guard-room, when without a word the gentleman with the green umbrella ran down the little staircase and called up from the bottom of it in that strange voice I was telling you about: "'Hi! Where are you going to? _It's this way!_'