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.