ated, and directly it is finished, I
will jump in it and fly to your arms. Of course you will ask what I am
to do with a travelling-carriage--I who have never made but one journey
in my life, and that from the Marais to the Faubourg Saint Honore? I
will reply, that I bought this carriage because I had the opportunity;
it is a chef-d'oeuvre. There never was a handsomer carriage made in
London. It was invented--and you will soon see what a splendid invention
it is--for an immensely rich English lady who is always travelling, and
who is greatly distressed at having to sell it, but she believes herself
pursued by an audacious young lover whom she wishes to get rid of, and
as he has always recognised her by her carriage, she parts with it in
order to put him off her track. She is an odd sort of woman whom they
call Lady Penock; she resembles Levassor in his English roles; that is
to say, she is a caricature. Levassor would not dare to be so
ridiculous.

Good-bye, until I see you. When I think that in one month we shall be
together again, I forget all my sorrows.

IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN.

XV.

ROGER DE MONBERT _to_ MONSIEUR DE MEILHAN,
Pont-de-l'Arche (Eure).

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