The duties of Captain Ravignac kept him in barracks near the aviation
field, but Marie he established in his apartments on the Boulevard
Haussmann. One day he brought from the barracks a roll of blue-prints,
and as he was locking them in a drawer, said: "The Germans would pay
through the nose for those!" The remark was indiscreet, but then Marie
had told him she was French, and any one would have believed her.

The next morning the same spirit of adventure that had exiled her from
the Berlin hospitals carried her with the blue-prints to the German
embassy. There, greatly shocked, they first wrote down her name and
address, and then, indignant at her proposition, ordered her out. But
the day following a strange young German who was not at all indignant,
but, on the contrary, quite charming, called upon Marie. For the
blue-prints he offered her a very large sum, and that same hour with
them and Marie departed for Berlin. Marie did not need the money. Nor
did the argument that she was serving her country greatly impress her.
It was rather that she loved intrigue. And so she became a spy.

Henri Ravignac, the man she had robbed of the blue-prints, was tried by
court martial. The charge was treason, but Charles Ravignac, his
younger brother, promised to prove that the guilty one was the girl, and
to that end obtained leave of absence and spent much time and money. At
the trial he was able to show the record of Marie in Berlin and Monte
Carlo; that she was the daughter of a German secret agent; that on the
afternoon the prints disappeared Marie, with an agent of the German
embassy, had left Paris for Berlin. In consequence of this the charge of
selling military secrets was altered to one of "gross neglect," and
Henri Ravignac was sentenced to two years in the military prison at
Tours. But he was of an ancient and noble family, and when they came to
take him from his cell in the Cherche-Midi, he was dead. Charles, his