Saint-Dizier, was a Jesuit.
Through her and her accomplices' machinations, the young lady's forward
yet virtuous, wildly aspiring but sensible, romantic but just, character
was twisted into a passable reason for her immurement in a mad-house.

This asylum adjoined St. Mary's Convent, into which Rose and Blanche
Simon were deceitfully conducted. To secure their removal, Dagobert had
been decoyed into the country, under pretence of showing some of General
Simon's document's to a lawyer; his son Agricola arrested for treason,
on account of some idle verses the blacksmith poet was guilty of, and
his wife rendered powerless, or, rather, a passive assistant, by the
influence of the confessional! When Dagobert hurried back from his wild
goose chase, he found the orphans gone: Mother Bunch (a fellow-tenant of
the house, who had been brought up in the family) ignorant, and his wife
stubbornly refusing to break the promise she had given her confessor,
and acquaint a single soul where she had permitted the girls to be
taken. In his rage, the soldier rashly accused that confessor, but
instead of arresting the Abbe Dubois, it was Mrs. Baudoin whom the
magistrate felt compelled to arrest, as the person whom alone
he ventured to commit for examination in regard to the orphans'
disappearance. Thus triumphs, for the time being, the unseen foe.

The orphans in a nunnery; the dethroned prince a poor castaway in a
foreign land; the noble young lady in a madhouse; the missionary priest
under the thumb of his superiors.

As for the man of the middle class, and the working man, who concluded
the list of this family, we are to read of them, as well as of the
others, in the pages which now succeed these.

CHAPTER I. THE MASQUERADE.

The following day to that on which Dagobert's wife (arrested for not
accounting for the disappearance of General Simon's daughters) was led
away before a magistrate, a noisy and animated scene was transpiring
on the Place du Chatelet, in front of a building whose first floor and
basement were used as the tap-rooms of the "Sucking Calf" public-house.

A carnival night was dying out.

Quite a number of maskers, grotesquely and shabbily bedecked, had rushed
out of the low dance-houses in the Guildhall Ward, and were roaring out
staves of songs as they crossed the square. But on catching sight of a
second troop of mummers running about the water-side, the first party
stopped to wait for the others to come u