Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy
woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen,
and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the
foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side
on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to
caress their goatees and finger their swords. Whether the gendarmes
were stationed here to keep the Apaches from preying on the marketmen
or the marketmen from preying on the Apaches I know not; but having
subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that selfsame market I
should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police
protection it was the Apaches. My money would be on the marketmen
every time.
Beyond the couchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage
cut out of stone and so came at length to what seemingly had
originally been a winevault, hollowed out far down beneath the
foundations of the building. The ceiling was so low that a tall
man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off. The place was full
of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and
had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever
since. For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked
old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed
in a perpetual snarl.
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