in the darkness.  We recalled another scene under these same tail trees, on a night when the iron gateway was “spanned by a naming arch of massed stars.”  The park was a “forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage,” and Lucy, driven from her couch by mental torture, wandered unrecognized amid the gay throng at the midnight concert of the Festival of the Martyrs and looked upon her lover, her friends the Brettons, and the secret junta of her enemies, Madame Beck, Madame Walravens, and Pere Silas.

The sense of familiarity with the vicinage grew as we observed our surroundings.  Facing us, at the extremity of the park, was the unpretentious palace of the king, in the small square across the Rue Royale at our right was the statue of General Beliard, and we knew that just behind it we should find the Rue Fossette and Charlotte Bronte’s pensionnat, for Crimsworth, “The Professor,” standing by the statue, had “looked down a great staircase” to the door-way of the school, and poor Lucy, on that forlorn first night in “Villette,” to avoid the insolence of a pair of ruffians, had hastened down a flight of steps from the Rue Royale, and had come, not to the inn she sought, but to the pensionnat of Madame Beck.

From the statue we descended, by a quadruple series of wide stone stairs, into a narrow street, old-fashioned and clean, quiet and secluded in the very heart of the great city,—­the Rue d’Isabelle,—­and just opposite the foot of the steps we came to the wide door of a spacious, quadrangular, stuccoed old mansion, with a bit of foliage showing over a high wall at one side.  A bright plate embellishes the door and bears the inscription,

PENSIONNAT de DEMOISELLES
Heger-parent.

A Latin inscription in the wall of the house shows it to have been given to the Guild of Royal Archers by the Infanta Isabelle early in the seventeenth century.  Long before that the garden had been the orchard and herbary of a convent and the Hospital for the Poor.

We were detained at the door long enough to remember Lucy standing there, trembling and anxious, awaiting admission, and then we too were “let in by a bonne in a smart cap,”—­apparently a fit successor to the Rosine of forty years ago,—­and entered the corridor.  This is paved with blocks of black and white marble and has painted walls.  It extends through the entire depth of the house, and at its farther extremity an open door afforded us a glimpse of the garden.

We were ushered into the little salon at the left of the passage,—­the one often mentioned in “Villette,”—­and here we made known our wish to see the garden and class-rooms, and met with a prompt refusal from the neat portresse.  We tried diplomacy (also lucre) with her, without avail:  it was the grandes vacances, the ladies were out, M. Heger was engaged, we could not be gratified,—­unless, indeed, we were patrons