"devils" she had told me would be there. They were all armed, some with
logs, others with tongs. I had nothing, but was bold enough to go to the
school-room, get a poker, and return to my accomplices without being
noticed.

Then they initiated me into the great secret, and we started on our
expedition.

The great secret was the traditional legend of the convent: a dream
handed down from generation to generation, and from "devil" to "devil,"
for about two centuries; a romantic fiction which may have had some
foundation of truth at the beginning, but now rested merely on the needs
of our imagination. Its object was to "deliver the victim." There was a
prisoner, some said several prisoners, shut up somewhere in an
impenetrable retreat: either a cell hidden and bricked up in the
thickness of the walls, or in a dungeon under the vaults of the immense
sub-basements extending beneath the monastery as well as under a great
part of the Saint-Victor district. There were indeed magnificent cellars
there,--a real subterranean city, whose limits we never found,--and they
had many mysterious outlets at different points within the vast area of
the inclosure. We were told that at a great distance off, these cellars
joined the excavations running under the greater part of Paris and the
surrounding country as far as Vincennes. [Footnote: Vincennes: a town
about two miles from Paris.] They said that by following our convent
cellars you could reach the Catacombs, [Footnote: Catacombs:
subterranean passages.] the quarries, the baths of Julian, [Footnote:
Baths of Julian: a Roman emperor of the fourth century.] and what not.
These vaults were the key to a world of darkness, terrors, mysteries: an
immense abyss dug beneath our feet, closed by iron gates, whose
exploration was as perilous as the descent into hell of AEneas or Dante.