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Updated: June 15, 2025
Chauvel, and Licquet immediately informed Mme. de Combray of this fact and represented to her, in a friendly manner, the danger in which her daughter's arrest would involve her, and insinuated that the only hope of security lay in the escape to England of Mme. Acquet, "on whose head the government had set a price."
He hoped by intercepting them to learn much from the confidences and advice the Marquise would give her fellow-prisoners. Having obtained this concession Licquet took hold of the enquiry, and found it a good field for the employment of his particular talents. No duel was ever more pitiless; never did a detective show more ingenuity and duplicity.
It is probable that the story was well told; but the Prefect of Calvados was none the less annoyed at the unceremonious procedure, as he testified a little later with some blustering. Licquet, moreover, was not deceived: on his return from Caen, he wrote: "Behold, I have quarrelled with the Prefect of Calvados." However, he cared very little about it.
In short, when Savoye-Rollin and Licquet sent her back to the Conciergerie, they felt that they had had the worst of it and gained nothing. Bonnoeil, when his turn came told them nothing but what they already knew, and Placide d'Aché flew into a rage and denied everything.
When she had finished her long declaration, she fell into a state of deep depression. On entering the prison next day, Licquet found her engaged in cutting off her magnificent hair, which, she said sadly, she wished to save from the executioner.
Whether solitude had altered her ardent nature, or whether she looked on death as the only possible end to her adventurous existence, she seemed indifferent as to her fate, and thought no longer of the future. Licquet had long abandoned her; he had been "her last friend."
Besides, M. Daudet had only at his disposal the portfolios 8,170, 8,171, and 8,172 of the Series F7 of the National Archives, and the reports sent to Réal by Savoye-Rollin and Licquet, this cunning detective beside whom Balzac's Corentin seems a mere schoolboy. Consequently the family drama escapes M. Daudet, who, for that matter, did not have to concern himself with it.
He took a bunch of keys and followed by Licquet and Legendre, went up to a little room under the roof of a narrow building next to Marillac's wing. This room had only one window, on the north, with a bit of green stuff for a curtain; its only furniture was a miserable wooden bed drawn into the middle of the room. Licquet and the commissary examined the partitions and had them sounded.
It was easy to induce Mme. de Combray to write another letter insisting once more on knowing "the exact address of the horse," and the lawyer at last answered unsuspectingly, "With Lanoë at Glatigny, near Bretteville-sur-Dives." With Lanoë! Why had Licquet never guessed it! This name, indeed, so often mentioned in the declarations of the prisoners, had made no impression on him. Mme.
Thus it was that on the 1st of October, Licquet, now sure of success, put the false Captain Delaitre in the coach leaving for Caen, having given him as assistants, a nephew of the same name and a servant, both carefully chosen from amongst the wiliest of his assistants.
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