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bell.
    “Sanson?” the man echoed him. “You mean the executioner? Not here. He doesn’t come here unless they’re fetching somebody away to be topped. But you might find him, or find word of him, at the public prosecutor’s office. Up in the Caesar Tower.” He jerked a thumb upward and behind him, toward the three conical towers, remnants of the Conciergerie’s origins as a medieval fortress, that edged the quayside. “Here, you’re a police agent, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before. You can cut through with me instead of going around the long way to the quay.”
    Aristide followed the man, glancing silently from side to side as they tramped through the dim corridors. A few gaunt and bedraggled women watched him without interest from open cell doors and from piles of dirty straw. His guide was cheerful for a jailer, and eager to point out spots of interest along their route.
    “I expect you know this is the women’s side? There, down the passage, that’s the cell the queen was in. Two months she was in that nasty damp place! Not that I hold with royalty, but it was cruel, it was. Next door, that’s where Robespierre spent his last hours. And just beyond it,” the turnkey continued, pointing, “that’s the old prison chapel. Course they don’t hold Mass in it any more. They use it as a common room sometimes. The Brissotin deputies, the twenty-one who were all topped together, they had their last dinner there, you know. Come to think of it, it was almost three years ago exactly, when they were topped. All Hallows’ Eve what was. Very sad it was, all those fine young gentlemen.”
    Mathieu …
    Aristide stepped forward, peering down the corridor at the gloomy chapel. “May I see it for a moment?”
    The turnkey nodded. “Please yourself.”
    He trod lightly down the short passage. The pale silhouette of a vanished crucifix gleamed faintly on the bare, smoke-grimed plaster and a few chairs and benches stood about amid scattered straw. It seemed suddenly like yesterday, an hour ago, a moment. Here in this dim, chill room they had dined and exchanged their last farewells, and sung “La Marseillaise,” and toasted the Republic that had condemned them.
    Of course the scene would not have been as sublime as popular legend already had it. Some of them, he imagined, remembering Mathieu’s sardonic descriptions of his comrades in public life, must have been foul-mouthed in their bitterness, or insufferably self-righteous in their political martyrdom.
    See that fellow? That’s Buzot … yes, the one who’s always hanging about Minister Roland’s wife. But all they do is gawk sentimentally at each other … I’d be surprised if Buzot actually knew how to do it, he’s such a sanctimonious prig …
    But they were all dead now, whatever their faults or merits, and Mathieu with them. No false sublimity for Mathieu at the final moment, but jest after black jest until they climbed the scaffold’s steps one by one, anything that might serve to keep the lurking terror of death at bay.
    Aristide searched the shadows as if he might find something of Mathieu, a phantom of his wicked smile, lingering there yet. He shut his eyes to the gloom and tried to remember him in happier days, the prankish boy he had known in Bordeaux, or the eager young man, glowing with revolutionary ardor—anything but his last glimpse of him, waiting in the rain before the guillotine.
    By force of childhood habit he hurriedly made the sign of the cross, for the sake of all the souls who had passed through that cold stone chamber. “ Requiescat in pace. ”
    “This way,” said the turnkey, beckoning him on. “Just up those stairs.” He unlocked a heavy iron-bound door that led to a spiral staircase. “Someone above can show you the way.”
    Aristide thanked him and climbed the stairs to the landing. Approaching the nearest clerk, he explained his errand.
    “Sanson?” echoed the clerk. “No, he’s not here. But Desmorets, his chief