Ferronerie, and a moment later was all but in the arms of a band of city
guards, who were making a house-to-house visitation.

He owed his safety rather to the condition of the street than to his
presence of mind. The Rue Ferronerie, narrow in itself, was so choked at
this date by stalls and bulkheads, that an edict directing the removal of
those which abutted on the cemetery had been issued a little before.
Nothing had been done on it, however, and this neck of Paris, this main
thoroughfare between the east and the west, between the fashionable
quarter of the Marais and the fashionable quarter of the Louvre, was
still a devious huddle of sheds and pent-houses. Tignonville slid behind
one of these, found that it masked the mouth of an alley, and, heedless
whither the passage led, ran hurriedly along it. Every instant he
expected to hear the hue and cry behind him, and he did not halt or draw
breath until he had left the soldiers far in the rear, and found himself
astray at the junction of four noisome lanes, over two of which the
projecting gables fairly met. Above the two others a scrap of sky
appeared, but this was too small to indicate in which direction the river
lay.

Tignonville hesitated, but not for long; a burst of voices heralded a new
danger, and he shrank into a doorway. Along one of the lanes a troop of
children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping
round something which they dragged by a string. Now one of the hindmost
would burl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish
laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they
stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go, or whose turn
it was to pull and whose to follow. At last they started afresh with a
whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of
the air. Their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward, and lingered