The exempt rode up to the bell-handle and gave a mighty pull, sufficient to have alarmed the whole village, had it not been so profoundly wrapped in sleep. As it was, it awoke the doctor immediately, for his ears were ever sensitive to the slightest tingle of a summons; and he forthwith struck a light, and projected his head, enveloped in a marvellous mass of wrappings, on account of the cold, from the window of the room which overlooked the road at the end of one of the wings.
‘Dieu de Dieux!’ exclaimed the doctor, as he saw the cavalcade below his window. ‘What is the matter? Who is hurt? Who are you?’
‘Admit me directly,’ said Desgrais, without deigning to answer the doctor’s questions; and in such a tone of authority that the professor, imagining nothing less than that he had been sent for by Louis Quatorze himself, or at the least Madame de Montespan, hurried on his clothes, and tumbled downstairs into the court-yard, to which the exempt and his force were soon admitted.
‘Eh bien, monsieur!’ said Desgrais; ‘you will now have the kindness to give up the Marchioness of Brinvilliers and an accomplice, whom you have sheltered in your house.’
The professor regarded the exempt with an air of a man who is asked a question before he is thoroughly awake.
‘Every instant of delay compromises your own security,’ continued Desgrais. ‘Where are they?’
‘On my word of honour, as a member of my learned profession, I know not what you mean, monsieur,’ at length gasped out the doctor. ‘There is no one within but Madame Chapelet and the servant.’
‘Sir,’ cried Desgrais in a voice of thunder, ‘if you do not immediately produce the fugitives, we will give you the question of the cord from the top of your own gateway.’
‘Will anybody tell me what I am expected to do?’ cried the professor in an agony of bewilderment. ‘Sir, captain——’
‘I am no captain, monsieur,’ interrupted Desgrais; ‘but an exempt of the Maréchaussée. We have traced the fugitives to your door, and now demand them of you. Gentlemen,’ he continued, to the guard, ‘dismount, and proceed to tie up the doctor and search his house.’