The office of the Superintendent of Police, Baron Lecazes, was an apartment severely sumptuous and furnished in the purest Imperialistic style. The power of the great Napoleon, laid low forever after the ephemeral sway of the Hundred Days, lived still in art. How could the suite of Lecazes be furnished otherwise, when it had been the official headquarters of Fouché, Napoleon's chief minister, the "Great Second" in power and, perhaps, behind the throne's draperies, the "Great First." He had occupied it during the stirring period in which the power of the police department attained its zenith,--Fouché, the only man who in reality knew the history of the epoch. Lecazes was said to have reaped the harvest of his predecessor's ingenious policy--tangled labyrinths of tunnels, secret passages, back stairways, hidden closets, dungeons wherein dangerous citizens kept gloomy vigils while gagged and fettered, awaiting presentation before the all-potent superintendent. There were chiffoniers and garde-robes whose compartments held every variety of disguises. Smothered voices, could they have become audible again, might have told of torture-galleries consummately fitted up, containing indented wheels, Austrian steel-blocks, English pricking-forks, Spanish weights and cords, Prussian metal helmets and other devices no less terrifying. The truth of these rumors cannot be vouched for but it is enough to say that they were disseminated by the Carbonari, whose society was then starting. It has also been said, perhaps rashly, that under the eye of Fouché there existed a chemical laboratory in which a turbaned doctor from the Orient, envoy from the Great Turk, concocted distillations of herbs which induced stupor, insanity or death. However legendary some of these statements may seem, however rash it may be to gainsay the erudite historians who give credit only to what is found in the records, it is well to recognize the fact that some of the most dramatic and highly significant happenings are among those of which all trace has been obliterated.