as he told Corentin, would sooner or later be felt.  He was anxious to create an inquiry office at the Prefecture of Police, to be intermediate between the Paris police in the strictest sense, the criminal police, and the superior general police, so as to enable the supreme board to profit by the various scattered forces.  No one but Peyrade, at his age, and after fifty-five years of confidential work, could be the connecting link between the three branches of the police, or the keeper of the records to whom political and judicial authority alike could apply for the elucidation of certain cases.  By this means Peyrade hoped, with Corentin’s assistance, to find a husband and scrape together a portion for his little Lydie.  Corentin had already mentioned the matter to the Director-General of the police forces of the realm, without naming Peyrade; and the Director-General, a man from the south, thought it necessary that the suggestion should come from the chief of the city police.

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.