Then he went down to the porter’s lodge.
“Fouguereau, you will watch the door yourself to-day. I wish to know exactly who comes to the house, and who leaves it.”
Then he threw himself into a hackney-coach, and was driven to the hotel de Maulincour, where he asked for the baron.
“Monsieur is ill,” they told him.
Jules insisted on entering, and gave his name. If he could not see the baron, he wished to see the vidame or the dowager. He waited some time in the salon, where Madame de Maulincour finally came to him and told him that her grandson was much too ill to receive him.
“I know, madame, the nature of his illness from the letter you did me the honor to write, and I beg you to believe—”
“A letter to you, monsieur, written by me!” cried the dowager, interrupting him. “I have written you no letter. What was I made to say in that letter, monsieur?”
“Madame,” replied Jules, “intending to see Monsieur de Maulincour to-day, I thought it best to preserve the letter in spite of its injunction to destroy it. There it is.”
Madame de Maulincour put on her spectacles, and the moment she cast her eyes on the paper she showed the utmost surprise.
“Monsieur,” she said, “my writing is so perfectly imitated that, if the matter were not so recent, I might be deceived myself. My grandson is ill, it is true; but his reason has never for a moment been affected. We are the puppets of some evil-minded person or persons; and yet I cannot imagine the object of a trick like this. You shall see my grandson, monsieur, and you will at once perceive that he is perfectly sound in mind.”