Peyrade and Corentin,
with all the foresight, and more than all the information of Bellart,
the Attorney-General, had said even in 1819: "If Louis XVIII. does not
consent to strike such or such a blow, to make away with such or such
a prince, is it because he hates his brother? He must wish to leave him
heir to a revolution."

Peyrade's door was graced with a slate, on which very strange marks
might sometimes be seen, figures scrawled in chalk. This sort of devil's
algebra bore the clearest meaning to the initiated.

Lydie's rooms, opposite to Peyrade's shabby lodging, consisted of an
ante-room, a little drawing-room, a bedroom, and a small dressing-room.
The door, like that of Peyrade's room, was constructed of a plate of
sheet-iron three lines thick, sandwiched between two strong oak planks,
fitted with locks and elaborate hinges, making it as impossible to force
it as if it were a prison door. Thus, though the house had a public
passage through it, with a shop below and no doorkeeper, Lydie lived
there without a fear. The dining-room, the little drawing-room, and her
bedroom--every window-balcony a hanging garden--were luxurious in their
Dutch cleanliness.

The Flemish nurse had never left Lydie, whom she called her daughter.
The two went to church with a regularity that gave the royalist grocer,
who lived below, in the corner shop, an excellent opinion of the worthy
Canquoelle. The grocer's family, kitchen, and counter-jumpers occupied
the first floor and the entresol; the landlord inhabited the second
floor; and the third had been let for twenty years past to a lapidary.
Each resident had a key of the street door. The grocer's wife was all
the more willing to receive letters and parcels addressed to these three
quiet households, because the grocer's shop had a letter-box.

Without these details, strangers, or even those who know Paris well,
could not have understood the privacy and quietude, the isolation and
safety which made this house exceptional in Paris. After midnight,
Pere Canquoelle could hatch plots, receive spies or ministers, wives or
hussies, without any one on earth knowing anything about it.

Peyrade, of whom the Flemish woman would say to the grocer's cook, "He
would not hurt a fly!" was regarded as the best of men. He grudged his
daughter nothing. Lydie, who had been taught music by Schmucke, was
herself a musician capable of composing; she could wash in a sepia
drawing, and paint in gouache an