At the moment when Contenson struck three raps on the table with the gold piece, a signal conveying,
“I want to speak to you,” the senior was reflecting on this problem:
“By whom, and under what pressure can the Prefet of Police be made to move?”— And he looked like a noodle studying his Courrier Francais.
“Poor Fouche!” thought he to himself, as he made his way along the Rue Saint–Honore, “that great man is dead! our go-betweens with Louis XVIII. are out of favor.
And besides, as Corentin said only yesterday, nobody believes in the activity or the intelligence of a man of seventy.
Oh, why did I get into a habit of dining at Very’s, of drinking choice wines, of singing La Mere Godichon, of gambling when I am in funds?
To get a place and keep it, as Corentin says, it is not enough to be clever, you must have the gift of management.
Poor dear M. Lenoir was right when he wrote to me in the matter of the Queen’s necklace, ‘You will never do any good,’ when he heard that I did not stay under that slut Oliva’s bed.”
If the venerable Pere Canquoelle — he was called so in the house — lived on in the Rue des Moineaux, on a fourth floor, you may depend on it he had found some peculiarity in the arrangement of the premises which favored the practice of his terrible profession.
The house, standing at the corner of the Rue Saint–Roch, had no neighbors on one side; and as the staircase up the middle divided it into two, there were on each floor two perfectly isolated rooms.
Those two rooms looked out on the Rue Saint–Roch.
There were garret rooms above the fourth floor, one of them a kitchen, and the other a bedroom for Pere Canquoelle’s only servant, a Fleming named Katt, formerly Lydie’s wet-nurse.
Old Canquoelle had taken one of the outside rooms for his bedroom, and the other for his study.
The study ended at the party-wall, a very thick one.
The window opening on the Rue des Moineaux looked on a blank wall at the opposite corner.
As this study was divided from the stairs by the whole width of Peyrade’s bedroom, the friends feared no eye, no ear, as they talked business in this study made on purpose for his detestable trade.
Peyrade, as a further precaution, had furnished Katt’s room with a thick straw bed, a felt carpet, and a very heavy rug, under the pretext of making his child’s nurse comfortable.
He had also stopped up the chimney, warming his room by a stove, with a pipe through the wall to the Rue Saint–Roch.
Finally, he laid several rugs on his floor to prevent the slightest sound being heard by the neighbors beneath.
An expert himself in the tricks of spies, he sounded the outer wall, the ceiling, and the floor once a week, examining them as if he were in search of noxious insects.
It was the security of this room from all witnesses or listeners that had made Corentin select it as his council-chamber when he did not hold a meeting in his own room.
Where Corentin lived was known to no one but the Chief of the Superior Police and to Peyrade; he received there such personages as the Ministry or the King selected to conduct very serious cases; but no agent or subordinate ever went there, and he plotted everything connected with their business at Peyrade’s.
In this unpretentious room schemes were matured, and resolutions passed, which would have furnished strange records and curious dramas if only walls could talk.
Between 1816 and 1826 the highest interests were discussed there.
There first germinated the events which grew to weigh on France.
There Peyrade and Corentin, with all the foresight, and more than all the information of Bellart, the Attorney–General, had said even in 1819:
“If Louis XVIII. does not consent to strike such or such a blow, to make away with such or such a prince, is it because he hates his brother?
He must wish to leave him heir to a revolution.”
Peyrade’s door was graced with a slate, on which very strange marks might sometimes be seen, figures scrawled in chalk.
This sort of devil’s algebra bore the clearest meaning to the initiated.
Lydie’s rooms, opposite to Peyrade’s shabby lodging, consisted of an ante-room, a little drawing-room, a bedroom, and a small dressing-room.
The door, like that of Peyrade’s room, was constructed of a plate of sheet-iron three lines thick, sandwiched between two strong oak planks, fitted with locks and elaborate hinges, making it as impossible to force it as if it were a prison door.
Thus, though the house had a public passage through it, with a shop below and no doorkeeper, Lydie lived there without a fear.
The dining-room, the little drawing-room, and her bedroom — every window-balcony a hanging garden — were luxurious in their Dutch cleanliness.
The Flemish nurse had never left Lydie, whom she called her daughter.
The two went to church with a regularity that gave the royalist grocer, who lived below, in the corner shop, an excellent opinion of the worthy Canquoelle. The grocer’s family, kitchen, and counter-jumpers occupied the first floor and the entresol; the landlord inhabited the second floor; and the third had been let for twenty years past to a lapidary.
Each resident had a key of the street door.
The grocer’s wife was all the more willing to receive letters and parcels addressed to these three quiet households, because the grocer’s shop had a letter-box.
Without these details, strangers, or even those who know Paris well, could not have understood the privacy and quietude, the isolation and safety which made this house exceptional in Paris.
After midnight, Pere Canquoelle could hatch plots, receive spies or ministers, wives or hussies, without any one on earth knowing anything about it.
Peyrade, of whom the Flemish woman would say to the grocer’s cook, “He would not hurt a fly!” was regarded as the best of men.
He grudged his daughter nothing.
Lydie, who had been taught music by Schmucke, was herself a musician capable of composing; she could wash in a sepia drawing, and paint in gouache and water-color.
Every Sunday Peyrade dined at home with her.
On that day this worthy was wholly paternal.
Lydie, religious but not a bigot, took the Sacrament at Easter, and confessed every month.
Still, she allowed herself from time to time to be treated to the play.
She walked in the Tuileries when it was fine.
These were all her pleasures, for she led a sedentary life.
Lydie, who worshiped her father, knew absolutely nothing of his sinister gifts and dark employments.