ROGER DE MONBERT _to_ MONSIEUR DE MEILHAN,
Pont-de-l'Arche (Eure).
PARIS, June 19th 18--.
It is useless to slander the police; we are obliged to resort to them in
our dilemmas; the police are everywhere, know everything, and are
infallible. Without the police Paris would go to ruin; they are the
hidden fortification, the invisible rampart of the capital; its numerous
agents are the detached forts. Fouché was the Vauban of this wonderful
system, and since Fouché's time, the art has been steadily approaching
perfection. There is to-day, in every dark corner of the city an eye
that watches over our fifty-four gates, and an ear that hears the
pulsations of all the streets, those great arteries of Paris.
The incapacity of my own agents making me despair of discovering
anything; I went to the Polyphemus of Jerusalem street, a giant whose
ever open eye watches every Ulysses. They told me in the office--Return
in three days.
Three centuries that I had to struggle through! How many centuries I
have lived during the last month!
The police! Why did not this luminous idea enter my mind before?
At this office of public secrets they said to me: Mlle. de Chateaudun
left Paris five days ago. On the 12th she passed the night at Sens; she
then took the route to Burgundy; changed horses at Villevallier, and on
the 14th stopped at the château of Madame de Lorgeville, seven miles
from Avallon.
The particularity of this information startled me. What wonderful
clock-work! What secret wheels! What intelligent mechanism! It is the
machine of Marly applied to a human river. At Rome a special niche would
have been devoted to the goddess of Police.
What a lesson to us! How circumspect it should make us! Our walls are
diaphanous, our words are overheard; our steps are watched ...
everything said and done reaches by secret informers and invisible
threads the central office of Jerusalem street. It is enough to make one
tremble!!!
_At the château of Mad. de Lorgeville_!
I walked along repeating this sentence to myself, with a thousand
variations: At the château of Mad. de Lorgeville.
After a decennial absence, I know nobody in Paris--I am just as much of
a stranger as the ambassador of Siam.... Who knows Mad. de Lorgeville?
M. de Balaincourt is the only person in Paris who can give me the
desired information--he is a living court calendar. I fly to see M. de
Balaincourt.
This oracle answers me thus: Mad. de Lorgeville is a very beautiful
woman, between twenty-four and twenty-six years of age. She possesses a
magnificent _mezzo-soprano_ voice, and twenty thousand dollars income.
She learnt miniature painting from Mad. Mirbel, and took singing lessons
from Mad. Damoyeau. Last winter she sang that beautiful duo from Norma,
with the Countess Merlin, at a charity concert.