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Updated: June 26, 2025
For a long time the train sped on in the most profound silence. Meanwhile it was freezing, in the second of the two police-vans, the sergents de ville, cramped and chilled, opened their cells, and in order to warm and stretch themselves walked up and down the narrow gangway which runs from end to end of the police-vans.
The driver shook his head vigorously as I signaled him. "I go to my dejeuner, Monsieur!" he explained. "On the contrary," said I fiercely, "you go to the tourist bureau of Monsieur Cook in the Place de l'Opera, at the greatest speed the sergents de ville allow!"
Later, as she grew older, she was admitted to their friendship and their confidence, but without ever sharing their pleasures. She was too proud to go to see weddings at midday; and when she heard them talking of a ball at Vauxhall or the 'Delices du Marais, or of a nice little supper at Bonvalet's or at the 'Quatre Sergents de la Rochelle, she was always very disdainful.
It was her design to avoid the customary routes to the heart of the city, and all would have gone well with them had not fate in the shape of two burly sergents de ville intervened at a time when success seemed most certain. It was quite clear to the pursued that the car containing their followers had been successfully eluded and was no doubt in the Champs Elysees by this time.
But as the flames caught the great wooden porch of the Prefecture, the screams of the women were heart-rending; They even disturbed Ferré, who sent orders "to stop their squalling." One warder, Braquond, ventured to remonstrate. "Bah!" said Ferré, "they are only women belonging to gendarmes and sergents de ville; we shall be well rid of them."
The night was wet, not with a downpour, but with showers interspaced by starry patches, which only added to the glitter of the handsome, clean Parisian surfaces. The sergents de ville were about the place, and seemed to make the occasion important and official.
After these executions a large number of so-called "hostages," ecclesiastics, soldiers of the line, sergents de ville, and police agents remained shut up in La Roquette. It was Saturday, May 27, the day before Whit Sunday. Says the Abbé Lamazou, "It was a few minutes past three, and I was kneeling in my cell saying my prayers for the day, when I heard bolts rattling in the corridor.
I suppose he would have called up his family, waked the drum-corps, sent for the Prefect of Police, put on the alert the 'sergents de ville, ordered under arms a regiment of the Imperial Guards, and made it unpleasant for the Man. All these thoughts passed through my mind, not with the rapidity of lightning, as is usual in such cases, but with the slowness of conviction.
At a turning in the Rue St Antoine he glanced behind, and noticed that the sergents de ville only followed the fiacre at a considerable distance. Not one of the four men which the fiacre was bearing away had as yet opened their lips. Cournet threw a meaning look at his two companions seated in front of him, as much as to say, "We are three; let us take advantage of this to escape."
We would refer to the good bourgeois, whom we have seen quitting the group in the Rue de Valois, and making for the Barrière des Sergents at the moment when the street-singer began his collection, and who, it will be remembered, we have since seen at so inopportune a moment in the Rue des Bons-Enfants.
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