ugh to hold fifteen
persons. In it were a wooden bench, a large chafing-dish, silver
candlesticks, a trunk full of papers and letters, two packets of hair of
different colours, and some treatises on games. They seized among other
things, the funeral oration of the Duc d'Enghien, copied by Placide, and
the passport d'Ache had obtained at Rouen in 1803, which was signed by
Licquet. When they had put everything in a bag and closed the
partition, when they had sufficiently admired the mechanism which left
no crack or opening visible, Soyer, still followed by two policemen,
went over the whole chateau, climbed to the loft, and stopped at last in
a little room at the end of the building. It was full of soiled linen
hung on ropes; a thick beam was fixed almost level with the ground, the
whole length of the wall embellished with shelves supported by brackets.
Soyer thrust his hand into a small, worm-eaten hole in the beam, and
drawing out a piece of iron, fitted it on a nail that seemed to be
driven into one of the brackets. Instantly the shelves folded up, a door
opened in the wall, and they entered a room large enough to hold fifty
people with ease. A window--impossible to discover from the
outside--opened on the roof of the chapel, and gave light and air to
this apartment; it contained only a large wardrobe, in which were an
earthen dish and an altar stone.

And so this old manor-house, with its venerable and homelike air, was
arranged as a resort for brigands, and an arsenal and retreat for a
little army of conspirators. For Soyer also revealed the secrets of the
_oubliettes_ of the little chateau, whose unfurnished rooms could
shelter a considerable garrison; they only found there three trunks full
of silver, marked with so many different arms that Licquet believed it
must have come from the many thefts perpetrated during the last fifteen
years in the neighbourhood. On examination it proved to be nothing of
the sort, but that all these different pieces of silver bore the arms
of branches of the families of Brunelle and Combray; but even though he
was obliged to withdraw his first supposition, Licquet was firm in
attributing to the owners of Tournebut all the misdeeds that had been
committed in the region since the Directory. These perfect
hiding-places, this chateau on the banks of the river, in the woods
between two roads, like the rocky nests in which the robber-chiefs of
the middle ages fortified themselves, explained s