Page 1486 - les-miserables

building communicated in the rear by a masked door which
opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved wind-
ing corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty
walls, which, hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were
between garden enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose
angles and detours it followed, ended in another door, also
with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league away,
almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the
Rue du Babylone.
Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those
who were spying on him and following him would merely
have observed that the justice betook himself every day in
a mysterious way somewhere, and would never have sus-
pected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go to the
Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the mag-
istrate had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on
his own property, and consequently, without interference.
Later on, he had sold in little parcels, for gardens and mar-
ket gardens, the lots of ground adjoining the corridor, and
the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought they had
a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the
long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their
flower-beds and their orchards. Only the birds beheld this
curiosity. It is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the
last century gossiped a great deal about the chief justice.
The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wain-
scoted and furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the
inside, old-fashioned on the outside, walled in with a triple
hedge of flowers, had something discreet, coquettish, and

1486 Les Miserables