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.  Fouche was the Vauban of this wonderful system, and since Fouche’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 chateau 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 chateau of Mad. de Lorgeville!

I walked along repeating this sentence to myself, with a thousand variations:  At the chateau 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.

I requested further details.

Madame de Lorgeville is the sister of the handsome Leon de Varezes.