When he bought the estate, fifteen years before the tragedy with which we are engaged occurred, the Chateau du Glandier had for a long time been unoccupied.
One day, however, Monsieur Stangerson, as he was leaving the Academy of Science, announced that the marriage of his daughter and Monsieur Robert Darzac would be celebrated in the privacy of the Chateau du Glandier, as soon as he and his daughter had put the finishing touches to their report summing up their labours on the "Dissociation of Matter." The new household would install itself in the Glandier, and the son-in-law would lend his assistance in the work to which the father and daughter had dedicated their lives.
The scientific world had barely had time to recover from the effect of this news, when it learned of the attempted assassination of Mademoiselle under the extraordinary conditions which we have detailed and which our visit to the chateau was to enable us to ascertain with yet greater precision.
It came on briskly, and came up to the front of the chateau.
If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains.
It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his.
For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human, stared blindly at the night.
It was impossible for them to inhabit the chateau, now converted into a workshop and filled with machinery, but lodgings were procured in its immediate vicinity.
The bleaching grounds of our manufactory were in the old park of the chateau. Thither Mad.
"Dans le bon vieux temps," said the vicomtesse, examining me through her spectacles, and addressing Georges, who stood, hat in hand, to hearken to her wisdom; "dans le bon vieux temps, mon ami, the ladies of the chateau did not want for these things.
The manufactory had saved the chateau, and the manufacturers had spared my wardrobe.
"Monsieur Grimaud is absent from the
chateau for the time being," said the servitor, who, little used as he was to such inquiries, began to examine Planchet from head to foot.
Are there any magistrates or judges at the Chateau d'If?"
"You think, then," said he, "that I am taken to the Chateau d'If to be imprisoned there?"
de Villefort promised you," said the gendarme, "but I know we are taking you to the Chateau d'If.
