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.