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In the Salle des Pas-Perdus, between the door into the first court of the inferior class and the steps leading to the sixth, the visitor must observe the first time he goes there a doorway without a door or any architectural adornment, a square hole of the meanest type.
This explains the miraculous ease with which information can be conveyed, during the sitting of the Courts, to the officials and the presidents of the Assize Courts. And by the time Monsieur Camusot had reached the top of the stairs leading to his chambers, Bibi-Lupin was there too, having come by the Salle des Pas-Perdus. "What zeal!" said Camusot, with a smile.
"Who are you?" asked the Duchess, without any pretence at politeness, as she looked at Asie from head to foot; for Asie, though she might be taken for a Baroness by Maitre Massol in the Salle des Pas-Perdus, when she stood on the carpet in the boudoir of the Hotel de Cadignan, looked like a splash of mud on a white satin gown.
Before the Revolution of July there was in the Conciergerie, and indeed there still is, a condemned cell. This room, backing on the governor's office, is divided from it by a thick wall in strong masonry, and the other side of it is formed by a wall seven or eight feet thick, which supports one end of the immense Salle des Pas-Perdus.
Some of them walked alone, briskly, in a great hurry; others demonstrated a skilful tardiness, stopping to talk politely to a journalist, and to give him notes of the day's meeting, or continuing, with a 'confrere' who was not an Academician, the conversation begun in the room of the 'pas-perdus'; it was the Bourse of consultations that was just closed.
So that the poor Nabob, persecuted everywhere, driven from the corridors, the Pas-Perdus, the restaurant, had adopted the course of never leaving his bench, where he sat motionless and mute throughout the sitting.
They were another source of vexation to him, those terrible constituents. They came in flocks, invaded the Salle des Pas-Perdus, galloped about in all directions like excited little black kids, calling from one end to the other of the echoing hall: "O Pé!
The mob thronged the precincts of the Palace, some persons had even penetrated into the grand chamber; no deliberations went on. Towards midnight, several companies of the French guards entered the hall of the Pas-Perdus; all the exits were guarded. The court was in commotion, the young councillors demanded that the deliberations should go on publicly.
So at last, embarrassed everywhere, driven from the corridors, from the Pas-Perdus, from the refreshment-room, the poor Nabob had adopted the course of never leaving his seat, where he remained motionless and without speaking during the whole time of the sitting.
"At the moment," says Guillaume, "when ... Mayor Hénon, with an escort of national bourgeois guards, reëntered the Hôtel de Ville, he met Bakounin in the hall of the Pas-Perdus. The mayor immediately ordered his companions to take him in custody and to confine him at once in an underground hiding-place."
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