The accusation hanging over the head of Maitre Quennebert was a very serious one,threatening his life,if proved.But he was not uneasy;he knew himself in possession of facts which would enable him to refute it triumphantly.
The platonic love of Angelique de Guerchi for the handsome Chevalier de Moranges had resulted,as we have seen,in no practical wrong to the Duc de Vitry.After her reconciliation with her lover,brought about by the eminently satisfactory explanations she was able to give of her conduct,which we have already laid before our readers,she did not consider it advisable to shut her heart to his pleadings much longer,and the consequence was that at the end of a year she found herself in a condition which it was necessary to conceal from everyone.To Angelique herself,it is true,the position was not new,and she felt neither grief nor shame,regarding the coming event as a means of making her future more secure by forging a new link in the chain which bound the duke to her.But he,sure that but for himself Angelique would never have strayed from virtue's path,could not endure the thought of her losing her reputation and becoming an object for scandal to point her finger at;so that Angelique,who could not well seem less careful of her good name than he,was obliged to turn his song of woe into a duet,and consent to certain measures being taken.
One evening,therefore,shortly before Maitre Quennebert's marriage,the fair lady set out,ostensibly on a journey which was to last a fortnight or three weeks.In reality she only made a circle in a post-chaise round Paris,which she re-entered at one of the barriers,where the duke awaited her with a sedan-chair.In this she was carried to the very house to which de Jars had brought his pretended nephew after the duel.Angelique,who had to pay dearly for her errors,remained there only twenty-four hours,and then left in her coffin,which was hidden in a cellar under the palace of the Prince de Conde,the body being covered with quicklime.Two days after this dreadful death,Commander de Jars presented himself at the fatal house,and engaged a room in which he installed the chevalier.
This house,which we are about to ask the reader to enter with us,stood at the corner of the rue de la Tixeranderie and the rue Deux-Portes.There was nothing in the exterior of it to distinguish it from any other,unless perhaps two brass plates,one of which bore the words MARIE LEROUX-CONSTANTIN,WIDOW,CERTIFIEDMIDWIFE,and the other CLAUDE PERREGAUD,SURGEON.These plates were affixed to the blank wall in the rue de la Tixeranderie,the windows of the rooms on that side looking into the courtyard.The house door,which opened directly on the first steps of a narrow winding stair,was on the other side,just beyond the low arcade under whose vaulted roof access was gained to that end of the rue des Deux-Portes.This house,though dirty,mean,and out of repair,received many wealthy visitors,whose brilliant equipages waited for them in the neighbouring streets.Often in the night great ladies crossed its threshold under assumed names and remained there for several days,during which La Constantin and Claude Perregaud,by an infamous use of their professional knowledge,restored their clients to an outward appearance of honour,and enabled them to maintain their reputation for virtue.The first and second floors contained a dozen rooms in which these abominable mysteries were practised.The large apartment,which served as waiting and consultation room,was oddly furnished,being crowded with objects of strange and unfamiliar form.It resembled at once the operating-room of a surgeon,the laboratory of a chemist and alchemist,and the den of a sorcerer.
There,mixed up together in the greatest confusion,lay instruments of all sorts,caldrons and retorts,as well as books containing the most absurd ravings of the human mind.There were the twenty folio volumes of Albertus Magnus;the works of his disciple,Thomas de Cantopre,of Alchindus,of Averroes,of Avicenna,of Alchabitius,of David de Plaine-Campy,called L'Edelphe,surgeon to Louis XIII and author of the celebrated book The Morbific Hydra Exterminated by the Chemical Hercules.Beside a bronze head,such as the monk Roger Bacon possessed,which answered all the questions that were addressed to it and foretold the future by means of a magic mirror and the combination of the rules of perspective,lay an eggshell,the same which had been used by Caret,as d'Aubigne tells us,when making men out of germs,mandrakes,and crimson silk,over a slow fire.In the presses,which had sliding-doors fastening with secret springs,stood Jars filled with noxious drugs,the power of which was but too efficacious;in prominent positions,facing each other,hung two portraits,one representing Hierophilos,a Greek physician,and the other Agnodice his pupil,the first Athenian midwife.
