I felt the horse beneath me move once more like a thing of life.

No enchanter with his wand, not Merlin nor Virgil, could have made a greater change in my world, than had the captain of the gate with his simple key! Or so it seemed to me in the first moments of freedom, and escape--of removal from those loathsome streets.
I looked back at Paris--at the cloud of smoke which hung over the towers and roofs; and it seemed to me the canopy of hell itself.

I fancied that my head still rang with the cries and screams and curses, the sounds of death.

In very fact, I could hear the dull reports of firearms near the Louvre, and the jangle of the bells.

Country-folk were congregated at the cross-roads, and in the villages, listening and gazing; asking timid questions of the more good-natured among us, and showing that the rumour of the dreadful work doing in the town had somehow spread abroad.