An Episode Under the Terror | Page 5

The words whispered in the pastry-cook's ear cooled his hot fit of
courage down to zero.
"Oh! I will just go out and say a word or two. I will rid you of him soon
enough," he exclaimed, as he bounced out of the shop.
The old lady meanwhile, passive as a child and almost dazed, sat down
on her chair again. But the honest pastry-cook came back directly. A
countenance red enough to begin with, and further flushed by the bake-
house fire, was suddenly blanched; such terror perturbed him that he
reeled as he walked, and stared about him like a drunken man.
"Miserable aristocrat! Do you want to have our heads cut off?" he
shouted furiously. "You just take to your heels and never show yourself
here again. Don't come to me for materials for your plots."
He tried, as he spoke, to take away the little box which she had slipped
into one of her pockets. But at the touch of a profane hand on her
clothes, the stranger recovered youth and activity for a moment,
preferring to face the dangers of the street with no protector save God,
to the loss of the thing she had just paid for. She sprang to the door,
flung it open, and disappeared, leaving the husband and wife
dumfounded and quaking with fright.
Once outside in the street, she started away at a quick walk; but her
strength soon failed her. She heard the sound of the snow crunching
under a heavy step, and knew that the pitiless spy was on her track. She
was obliged to stop. He stopped likewise. From sheer terror, or lack of
intelligence, she did not dare to speak or to look at him. She went
slowly on; the man slackened his pace and fell behind so that he could
still keep her in sight. He might have been her very shadow.
Nine o'clock struck as the silent man and woman passed again by the
Church of Saint Laurent. It is in the nature of things that calm must

succeed to violent agitation, even in the weakest soul; for if feeling is
infinite, our capacity to feel is limited. So, as the stranger lady met with
no harm from her supposed persecutor, she tried to look upon him as an
unknown friend anxious to protect her. She thought of all the
circumstances in which the stranger had appeared, and put them
together, as if to find some ground for this comforting theory, and felt
inclined to credit him with good intentions rather than bad.
Forgetting the fright that he had given the pastry-cook, she walked on
with a firmer step through the upper end of the Faubourg Saint Martin;
and another half-hour's walk brought her to a house at the corner where
the road to the Barriere de Pantin turns off from the main thoroughfare.
Even at this day, the place is one of the least frequented parts of Paris.
The north wind sweeps over the Buttes- Chaumont and Belleville, and
whistles through the houses (the hovels rather), scattered over an
almost uninhabited low-lying waste, where the fences are heaps of
earth and bones. It was a desolate-looking place, a fitting refuge for
despair and misery.
The sight of it appeared to make an impression upon the relentless
pursuer of a poor creature so daring as to walk alone at night through
the silent streets. He stood in thought, and seemed by his attitude to
hesitate. She could see him dimly now, under the street lamp that sent a
faint, flickering light through the fog. Fear gave her eyes. She saw, or
thought she saw, something sinister about the stranger's features. Her
old terrors awoke; she took advantage of a kind of hesitation on his part,
slipped through the shadows to the door of the solitary house, pressed a
spring, and vanished swiftly as a phantom.
For awhile the stranger stood motionless, gazing up at the house. It was
in some sort a type of the wretched dwellings in the suburb; a
tumble-down hovel, built of rough stones, daubed over with a coat of
yellowish stucco, and so riven with great cracks that there seemed to be
danger lest the slightest puff of wind might blow it down. The roof,
covered with brown moss-grown tiles, had given way in several places,
and looked as though it might break down altogether under the weight
of the snow. The frames of the three windows on each story were rotten
with damp and warped by the sun; evidently the cold must find its way
inside. The house standing thus quite by itself looked like some old
tower that Time had forgotten to destroy. A faint light shone from the

attic windows pierced at irregular distances in the roof; otherwise