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The trap-door has disappeared from under it, the cellar being abandoned as useless. On the first floor as on the second, where the partitions have been removed, there are still traces of them, with fragments of wall-paper. The very little daylight that filters through the windows justifies Mme. Moisson's exclamation, "It is a prison!"
The platform, from which the view is very fine, has been renewed, like the staircase. But from top to bottom all corresponds with Moisson's description. All that remained now was to find out how one could get into the cellar from outside. We had two excellent guides; our kind host, M. Constantin, and M. l'Abbé Drouin, the curé of Aubevoye, who knew all the local traditions.
Was it through fear of this woman's writing indiscreetly to her husband that Mme. de Combray remained silent? But in any case, why the tower? However this may be, the exactness of Moisson's reminiscences was proved. But the trap-door had not been forced, as he believed, by Chouans fleeing after some nocturnal expedition.
At the time that he was preparing his great work on "Frotté and the Norman Insurrections," he learned from M. Gustave Bord that I had some special facts concerning Mme. de Combray, and wrote to ask me about them. I sent him a résumé of Moisson's story, and asked him to verify its correctness. And on that he went finely astray.
There was no longer any room for it in the year VIII and IX when, vigorous measures having almost cleared the country of the bands of "chauffeurs" and other bandits who infested it, the greater number of those who had escaped being shot or guillotined joined what remained of the royalist army, last refuge of brigandage. In such a time Moisson's adventure was not at all extraordinary.
There was, moreover, a particular attraction in this old forgotten tower, in which we alone were interested, and in examining into Moisson's story!
Convinced solely by the assertions of MM. Le Prévost and Bourdon that in 1804 the Château of Aubevoye and its tower no longer existed, and that Mme. de Combray occupied Donnay at that date, M. de la Sicotière naturally mistook one Tournebut for the other, did not understand a single word of Moisson's story, which he treated as a chimera, and in his book acknowledges my communications in this disdainful note: "Confusion has arisen in many minds between the two Tournebuts, so different, however, and at such a distance from each other, and has given birth to many strange and romantic legends; inaccessible retreats arranged for outlaws and bandits in the old tower, nocturnal apparitions, innocent victims paying with their lives the misfortune of having surprised the secrets of these terrible guests...."
When Phélippeaux was questioned, during the trial of Georges Cadoudal, about Moisson's father, who had disappeared, he replied that he lived in the street and island of Saint-Louis near the new bridge; that he was an engraver and manager of a button factory; that Mme. Moisson had a servant named R. Petit-Jean, married to a municipal guard.
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