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What makes us think that he was Licquet's pupil, or that at least he had some connection with the police of Rouen, is that in 1817, at the time of the Bruneau intrigue, we find him marrying the woman, Delaitre, aged forty-six, and living on an allowance from the parish and a sum left him "by a person who had died at Bicêtre."
The gazettes had been ordered to ignore it; the Journal de Rouen only spoke of it once to state that, as it lacked space to reproduce the whole trial, it preferred to abstain altogether; and but for a few of Licquet's notes, nothing would be known of the character of the proceedings. The interrogation of the accused and the examination of the witnesses occupied seven sittings.
He let Mme. de Combray hear that Lefebre had fainted during an examination, and was not in a condition to write. But she did not slacken her correspondence, and wrote several letters daily to the lawyer, which greatly increased Licquet's perplexity: "Tell me what has become of my yellow horse. The police are still at Tournebut; now if they hear about the horse you can guess the rest.
Branzon, a revenue collector and friend of Licquet's procured the little Acquets a card from the prefect, by showing which they were allowed to wait at the door of the Emperor's residence. We quote the very words of the letter written the same day by Ducolombier to Bonnoeil and the old Marquise: "Mlle.
Whatever it may have been, this incident interrupted Licquet's journey to Caen. He continued it towards the middle of November, quitting Rouen on the 18th, still accompanied by Delaitre and others of his cleverest men. This time he represented himself as an inspector of taxes, which gave him the right of entering houses and visiting even the cellars.
Whether Mme. de Placène was, as Vannier suspected, employed by the police and knew Licquet's real personality, or whether the latter found another intermediary, it is certain that he obtained Acquet de Férolles' confidence from the beginning, and that he got the credit of having him set at liberty. It was after this interview that Licquet asked Réal to recall him to Paris for twenty-four hours.
She imagined that from her cell she still directed her confederates and agents, whom she considered one and all as servants, never suspecting that the permission to write letters, of which she made such bad use, was only a trap set for her ingenuous vanity. In less than a month she had written more than a hundred letters to her fellow-prisoners, which all passed through Licquet's hands.
And so the detective, who had played his last card, was in an agony during the two weeks' absence of his men. At last they returned, discomfited and weary, leading the foundered yellow horse, and accompanied by a sort of colossus, "somewhat resembling a grenadier," who was no other than Lanoë's wife. The story told by Licquet's emissaries was as short as it was delusive.
Mme. de Combray had applied to the woman Delaitre for this "safe and intelligent man," and the latter had, at Licquet's instance, offered the services of her husband, an honest royalist, who in reality did not exist, but was to be personated by a man whom Licquet had ready to send in search of the horse as soon as its whereabouts should be determined.
It seemed most probable that the affair of Quesnay and the great plot of which it was an off-shoot, were going to join many others of the same kind, whose originators Fouché's police had despaired of finding, when an unexpected event reawakened Licquet's fervour and suggested to him a new machination. Seclusion, isolation and trouble had in no way softened the Marquise de Combray's harsh nature.
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