“And the husband?”

“Released; he was a spy.”

“Was your mother called as a witness?”

“No, happily, they knew nothing about us.  Besides, what would she have said?”

“Nothing, except that the people who frightened you so much, must surely have belonged to the band; that they had forced the trap-door, after a nocturnal expedition, on which they had been pursued as far as a subterranean entrance, which without doubt led to the cellar.”

After we had chatted a while on this subject Moisson wished me good-night, and I took up Balzac’s chef d’oeuvre and resumed my reading.  But I only read a few lines; my imagination was wandering elsewhere.  It was a long distance from Balzac’s idealism to the realism of Moisson, which awakened in me memories of the stories and melodramas of Ducray-Duminil, of Guilbert de Pixerecourt—­“Alexis, ou la Maisonette dans les Bois,” “Victor, ou l’Enfant de la Foret,”—­and many others of the same date and style so much discredited nowadays.  And I thought that what caused the discredit now, accounted for their vogue formerly; that they had a substratum of truth under a mass of absurdity; that these stories of brigands in their traditional haunts, forests, caverns and subterranean passages, charmed by their likelihood the readers of those times to whom an attack on a coach by highwaymen with blackened faces was as natural an occurrence as a railway accident is to us, and that in what seems pure extravaganza to us they only saw a scarcely exaggerated picture of things that were continually happening under their eyes.  In the reports published by M. Felix Rocquain we can learn the state of France during the Directory and the early years of the Commune.  The roads, abandoned since 1792, were worn into such deep ruts, that to avoid them the waggoners made long circuits in ploughed land, and the post-chaises would slip and sink into the muddy bogs from which it was impossible to drag them except with oxen.  At every step through the country one came to a deserted hamlet, a roofless house, a burned farm, a chateau in ruins.  Under the indifferent eyes of a police that cared only for politics, and of gendarmes recruited in such a fashion that a criminal often recognised an old comrade in the one who arrested him, bands of vagabonds and scamps of all kinds had been formed; deserters, refractories, fugitives from the pretended revolutionary army, and terrorists without employment, “the scum,” said Francois de Nantes, “of the Revolution and the war; ‘lanterneurs’ of ’91, ‘guillotineurs’ of ’93, ‘sabreurs’ of the year III, ‘assommeurs’ of the year IV, ‘fusilleurs’ of the year V.”  All this canaille lived only by rapine and murder, camped in the forests, ruins and deserted quarries like that at Gueudreville, an underground passage one hundred feet long by thirty broad, the headquarters of the band of Orgeres, a thoroughly organised company of bandits—­chiefs, subchiefs, storekeepers, spies, couriers, barbers, surgeons, dressmakers, cooks, preceptors for the “gosses,” and cure!