ROGER DE MONBERT
to
MONSIEUR DE MEILHAN,
Pont-de-l'Arche (Eure).
PARIS, June 19th 18—.
It is useless to slander the police; we are obliged to resort to them in our dilemmas; the police are everywhere, know everything, and are infallible. Without the police Paris would go to ruin; they are the hidden fortification, the invisible rampart of the capital; its numerous agents are the detached forts. Fouché was the Vauban of this wonderful system, and since Fouché's time, the art has been steadily approaching perfection. There is to-day, in every dark corner of the city an eye that watches over our fifty-four gates, and an ear that hears the pulsations of all the streets, those great arteries of Paris.
The incapacity of my own agents making me despair of discovering anything; I went to the Polyphemus of Jerusalem street, a giant whose ever open eye watches every Ulysses. They told me in the office—Return in three days.
Three centuries that I had to struggle through! How many centuries I have lived during the last month!
The police! Why did not this luminous idea enter my mind before?
At this office of public secrets they said to me: Mlle. de Chateaudun left Paris five days ago. On the 12th she passed the night at Sens; she then took the route to Burgundy; changed horses at Villevallier, and on the 14th stopped at the château of Madame de Lorgeville, seven miles from Avallon.