He then resigned himself to make known his presence at the great lady’s door as he would have done at that of a grisette.  He rapped with his knuckles, but a hollow sonority revealing the void, “intonuere cavernae,” echoed beyond the door which he vainly appealed to with his fist.  He also perceived from beneath that door a ray of vivid light, the sure sign of an uninhabited apartment where curtains and carpets and furniture no longer dim the light or deaden sound.  Compelled to believe in a total removal, la Peyrade now supposed that in the rupture with Brigitte, mentioned as probable by Madame de Godollo, some brutal insolence of the old maid had necessitated this abrupt departure.  But why had he not been told of it?  And what an idea, to expose him to this ridiculous meeting with what the common people call, in their picturesque language, “the wooden face”!

Before leaving the door finally, and as if some doubt still remained in his mind, la Peyrade made a last and most thundering assault upon it.

“Who’s knocking like that, as if they’d bring the house down?” said the porter, attracted by the noise to the foot of the staircase.

“Doesn’t Madame de Godollo still live here?” asked la Peyrade.

“Of course she doesn’t live here now; she has moved away.  If monsieur had told me he was going to her apartment I would have spared him the trouble of battering down the door.”

“I knew that she was going to leave the apartment,” said la Peyrade, not wishing to seem ignorant of the project of departure, “but I had no idea she was going so soon.”

“I suppose it was something sudden,” said the porter, “for she went off early this morning with post-horses.”

“Post-horses!” echoed la Peyrade, stupefied.  “Then she has left Paris?”

“That’s to be supposed,” said the porter; “people don’t usually take post-horses and a postilion to change from one quarter of Paris to another.”

“And she did not tell you where she was going?”

“Ah! monsieur, what an idea!  Do people account to us porters for what they do?”

“No, but her letters—­those that come after her departure?”

“Her letters?  I am ordered to deliver them to Monsieur le commandeur, the little old gentlemen who came to see her so often; monsieur must have met him.”

“Yes, yes, certainly,” said la Peyrade, keeping his presence of mind in the midst of the successive shocks which came upon him,—­“the powered little man who was here every day.”

“I couldn’t say every day; but he came often.  Well, I am told to give the countess’s letters to him.”

“And for other persons of her acquaintance,” said la Peyrade, carelessly, “did she leave no message?”

“None, monsieur.”

“Very well,” said la Peyrade, “good-morning.”  And he turned to go out.

“But I think,” said the porter, “that Mademoiselle Thuillier knows more about it than I do.  Won’t monsieur go up?  She is at home; and so is Monsieur Thuillier.”