last night before the dance was over at the château."




CHAPTER VI

TWO PRODUCTS OF THE REVOLUTION


In the Rue Valette, a street of long memory, down which many students
had passed dreaming, Calvin not least among them, there was a baker's
shop at the corner of an alley. Students still walked the streets, and
others, dreaming too, after a fashion, but not much of books. In these
days there were other things to dream of. Life moved quickly, crowdedly,
down the Rue Valette, and this baker's shop had gathered more than one
crowd about it in recent days. Life and such a shop Were linked
together, linked, too, with government. Give us bread, was one of the
earliest cries in the Revolution. Is not bread, the baker's shop, the
real center of all revolutions?

Behind this shop, entered by the alley, was a narrow courtyard, not too
clean a depository for rubbish and broken articles, for refuse as well,
which on hot days sent contamination into the air. A doorway, narrow and
seldom closed, gave directly on to a stairway, and on the first landing,
straight in front of the stairs, was a door always closed, usually
locked, yet at a knock it would be immediately opened. Behind it two
rooms adjoined, their windows looking into the court. The furniture was
sparse and common, the walls were bare, no more than a worn rug was upon
the floor, but on a hanging shelf there were books, and paper and pens