“She had heard of me through a friend, she said, and she sought my assistance in a most difficult matter. In plain English she wanted me to help in the escape of a convict.
“I was aghast. I was about to order her out of the office, when something—something—something, I don’t know what, held my tongue and kept me from rising for a moment, whilst with the cunning, which amounts to magic, of a desperate woman in love, she managed to calm my anger. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘and I should have been surprised if you had taken the matter calmly, but will you listen to me, and when you have heard me out, tell me if you would not have done what I have done to-day?’
“I could not stop her, and this is what she told me:
“Her name was Madame Armand Duplessis, her maiden name had been Alexandre. She was the only child of Alexandre, the big sugar refiner, and at his death she found herself a handsome young girl with a fortune of about twenty million francs and nothing between her and the rogues of the world but an old maiden aunt given to piety and guileless as a rabbit. However, she managed to escape the sharks and married an excellent man, a Captain in the Cavalry and attached to St. Cyr. He died shortly after the marriage, and the young widow, left desolate and without a child to console her, took up living again with her aunt, or rather the aunt came to live with her in the big house she occupied on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
“About six months after she met Duplessis. I don’t know how she met him, she didn’t say, but anyhow he wasn’t quite in the same circle as herself. He was a clerk in La Fontaine’s Bank, and only drawing a few thousand francs a year, but he was handsome and attractive and young, and the upshot of it was they got married.
“She did not know anything of his past history and he had no family in evidence, nothing to stand on at all but his position at the bank; but she did not mind, she was in love and she took him on trust and they got married. A few months after marriage a change came over Duplessis; he had always been given rather to melancholy, but now an acute depression of spirits came on him for no reason apparently; he could not sleep, his appetite failed, and the doctors, fearing consumption, ordered him a sea voyage. When he heard this prescription he laughed in such a strange way that Madame Duplessis, who had been full of anxiety as to his bodily condition, became for a moment apprehensive as to this mental state. However, she said nothing, keeping her fears hidden and busying herself in preparations for the voyage.
“It chanced that just at that moment a friend had a yacht to dispose of, an eight hundred ton auxiliary-engined schooner, La Gaudriole. It was going cheap, and Madame Duplessis, who was a good business woman, bought it, reckoning to sell it again when the voyage was over.
“A month later they left Marseilles.
“They visited Greece and the Islands; then, having touched at Alexandria, they passed through the Canal, came down the Red Sea and crossed the Indian Ocean. They touched at Ceylon, and whilst there Madame Duplessis suggested that instead of going to Madras, as they had intended, they should go into the Pacific by way of the Straits of Malacca. Duplessis opposed this suggestion at first, then he fell in with it. More than that, he became enthusiastic about it. A weight seemed suddenly to have been lifted from his mind, his eyes grew bright and the melancholy that all the breezes of the Indian Ocean had not blown away suddenly vanished.
“Two days later they left Ceylon, came through the Straits of Malacca and by way of the Arafura Sea and Torres Straits into the Pacific. The Captain of the yacht had suggested the Santa Cruz islands as their first stopping place, but one night Duplessis took his wife aside and asked her would she mind their making for New Caledonia instead. Then he gave his reason.