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CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE WITH
A SECRET
About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the
Parliament of Paris having a mistress and concealing the
fact, for at that period the grand seignors displayed their
mistresses, and the bourgeois concealed them, had ‘a little
house’ built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the deserted
Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet, not far from
the spot which was then designated as Combat des Ani-
maux.
This house was composed of a single-storied pavil-
ion; two rooms on the ground floor, two chambers on the
first floor, a kitchen down stairs, a boudoir up stairs, an at-
tic under the roof, the whole preceded by a garden with a
large gate opening on the street. This garden was about an
acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen
by passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow
courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building
consisting of two rooms and a cellar, a sort of preparation
destined to conceal a child and nurse in case of need. This