This asylum adjoined St. Mary’s Convent, into which Rose and Blanche Simon were deceitfully conducted.  To secure their removal, Dagobert had been decoyed into the country, under pretence of showing some of General Simon’s document’s to a lawyer; his son Agricola arrested for treason, on account of some idle verses the blacksmith poet was guilty of, and his wife rendered powerless, or, rather, a passive assistant, by the influence of the confessional!  When Dagobert hurried back from his wild goose chase, he found the orphans gone:  Mother Bunch (a fellow-tenant of the house, who had been brought up in the family) ignorant, and his wife stubbornly refusing to break the promise she had given her confessor, and acquaint a single soul where she had permitted the girls to be taken.  In his rage, the soldier rashly accused that confessor, but instead of arresting the Abbe Dubois, it was Mrs. Baudoin whom the magistrate felt compelled to arrest, as the person whom alone he ventured to commit for examination in regard to the orphans’ disappearance.  Thus triumphs, for the time being, the unseen foe.

The orphans in a nunnery; the dethroned prince a poor castaway in a foreign land; the noble young lady in a madhouse; the missionary priest under the thumb of his superiors.

As for the man of the middle class, and the working man, who concluded the list of this family, we are to read of them, as well as of the others, in the pages which now succeed these.

CHAPTER I.

The masquerade.

The following day to that on which Dagobert’s wife (arrested for not accounting for the disappearance of General Simon’s daughters) was led away before a magistrate, a noisy and animated scene was transpiring on the Place du Chatelet, in front of a building whose first floor and basement were used as the tap-rooms of the “Sucking Calf” public-house.

A carnival night was dying out.

Quite a number of maskers, grotesquely and shabbily bedecked, had rushed out of the low dance-houses in the Guildhall Ward, and were roaring out staves of songs as they crossed the square.  But on catching sight of a second troop of mummers running about the water-side, the first party stopped to wait for the others to come up, rejoicing, with many a shout, in hopes of one of those verbal battles of slang and smutty talk which made Vade so illustrious.

This mob—­nearly all its members half seas over, soon swollen by the many people who have to be up early to follow their crafts—­suddenly concentrated in one of the corners of the square, so that a pale, deformed girl, who was going that way, was caught in the human tide.  This was Mother Bunch.  Up with the lark, she was hurrying to receive some work from her employer.  Remembering how a mob had treated her when she had been arrested in the streets only the day before, by mistake, the poor work-girl’s fears may be imagined when she was now surrounded by the revellers against her will.  But, spite of all her efforts—­very feeble, alas!—­she could not stir a step, for the band of merry-makers, newly arriving, had rushed in among the others, shoving some of them aside, pushing far into the mass, and sweeping Mother Bunch—­who was in their way—­clear over to the crowd around the public-house.