“Then he gathered round him a dozen country gentlemen, more or less honorable and more or less in debt, to whom he revealed only a part of the affair and whom he has trained to be a band of conspirators ready for any task. Each of them has his sphere of action, each his sphere of investigation; and he holds them by the money he lavishes on them. “Two years of careful and minute investigation have produced results by no means negligible. First of all they have learned that the priest who was guillotined was Brother Nicolas, treasurer of Fécamp Abbey. Then, by dint of ransacking secret archives and old records, they have discovered a curious correspondence formerly carried on between all the monasteries in France; and it appears to be established that since a very remote time there was throughout the country a current of money, which was in the nature of a tithe paid by all the religious institutions, that flowed only into the monasteries of the Caux country. This seems to have constituted a common treasure, an inexhaustible reserve in view of possible attacks to be repelled, or crusades to be undertaken. A treasury council, composed of seven members, handled this wealth, but only one of them knew its hiding-place. “The Revolution destroyed all the monasteries. But the treasure existed. Brother Nicolas was its last guardian.” A prolonged silence followed her narrative. Ralph’s curiosity had not been disappointed; and he was deeply moved. He murmured with restrained enthusiasm: “But how splendid it is! What a magnificent adventure! I have always been perfectly certain that the past has bequeathed to the present fabulous treasures, the search for which inevitably takes the form of solving an almost insoluble problem. How could it be otherwise? Unlike us, our ancestors had not at their disposal the strong-rooms and cellars of the Bank of France. They were obliged to choose natural hiding-places in which they heaped up their gold and jewels, and the secret of which they passed on by means of some mnemonical formula which was, so to speak, the key of the lock. Let a catastrophe occur, the secret was lost, and so was the treasure so painfully accumulated.” His excitement was increasing, and he cried joyfully: “But this treasure shall not be lost, Josine; and it is one of the most fantastic of all of them. If Brother Nicolas spoke the truth--and everything goes to show that he did speak the truth--if the ten thousand precious stones were dropped into this strange strong-box, one can reckon this property left by the Middle Ages,[C] this result of the efforts of millions of monks, this gigantic offering of a whole Christian people during the great epoch of fanaticism, everything that is in the bowels of a boundary stone in a meadow in Normandy at something like a thousand million francs! It’s wonderful!”