"Oh, that's a new street. It's called the Rue du Pont Neuf. It
leads from the Seine through here to the Rue Montmartre and the Rue
Montorgueil. You would soon have recognized where you were if it had
been daylight."

Madame Francois paused and rose, for she saw a woman heading down to
examine her turnips. "Ah, is that you, Mother Chantemesse?" she said in
a friendly way.

Florent meanwhile glanced towards the Rue Montorgueil. It was there
that a body of police officers had arrested him on the night of December
4.[*] He had been walking along the Boulevard Montmartre at about two
o'clock, quietly making his way through the crowd, and smiling at the
number of soldiers that the Elysee had sent into the streets to awe the
people, when the military suddenly began making a clean sweep of the
thoroughfare, shooting folks down at close range during a quarter of an
hour. Jostled and knocked to the ground, Florent fell at the corner
of the Rue Vivienne and knew nothing further of what happened, for the
panic-stricken crowd, in their wild terror of being shot, trampled over
his body. Presently, hearing everything quiet, he made an attempt to
rise; but across him there lay a young woman in a pink bonnet, whose
shawl had slipped aside, allowing her chemisette, pleated in little
tucks, to be seen. Two bullets had pierced the upper part of her bosom;
and when Florent gently removed the poor creature to free his legs,
two streamlets of blood oozed from her wounds on to his hands. Then he
sprang up with a sudden bound, and rushed madly away, hatless and with
his hands still wet with blood. Until evening he wandered about the
streets, with his head swimming, ever seeing the young woman lying
across his legs with her pale face, her blue staring eyes, her distorted