He learned from his servant of the robbery of the coach.  The next day, Redet, the butcher of Meslay, said that ten days previously, when he was passing the ruins of the Abbey of Val “his mare shied, frightened at the sight of seven or eight men, who came out from behind a hedge;” they asked him the way to Rouen.  Redet, without answering, made off, and as he told every one of this encounter, Hebert the liegeman of Mme. de Combray, had instantly begged him not to spread it about.  If Acquet had retained any doubt, this would have satisfied him.  He hurried to Meslay to consult with his friend Darthenay, and the next day, he wrote to the commandant of gendarmerie inviting him to search the Chateau of Donnay.

The visit took place on Friday, 12th June, and was conducted by Captain Pinteville.  Acquet offered to guide him, and the search brought some singular discoveries.  Certain doors of this great house, long abandoned, were found with strong locks recently put on; others were nailed up and had to be broken in.  “In a dark, retired loft that it was difficult to enter” (Acquet conducted the gendarmes) “a pile of hay still retained the impress of six men who had slept on it”; some fresh bones, scraps of bread and meat, and the dirt bore witness that the band had lived there; some sheets of paper belonging to a memoir printed by Hely de Bonnoeil, brother of Mme. Acquet were rolled into cartridges and hidden in a corner under the tiles.  They also found the sacks that the Buquets had hidden there after the theft; in the floor of the cellar a hole, “two and a half feet square, and of the same depth had been dug to hold the money;” they had taken the precaution to tear up the flooring above so that the depot could be watched from there.  The idea of hiding the treasure here had been abandoned, as we know, in favour of Buquets’; but the discovery was important and Pinteville drew up a report of it.

But things went no further.  What suspicion could attach to the owners of Donnay?  The brigands, it is true, had made use of their house, but there were no grounds for an accusation of complicity in that.  Neither Pinteville nor Caffarelli, who transmitted the report to the minister, thought of pushing their enquiries any further.

Fouche knew no more about it, but he thought that the affair was being feebly conducted.  It seemed evident that the attempt at Quesnay would swell the already long list of thefts of public funds, by those who would forever remain unpunished.  Real, instinctively scenting d’Ache in the business, remembered Captain Manginot who at the time of Georges Cadoudal’s plot, had succeeded in tracing the stages of the conspirators between Biville and Paris, and to whom they owed the discovery of the role played by d’Ache in the conspiracy.