About three weeks after we were established there, I walked one day with my mother to the bankers, for the purpose of delivering our letter of credit from Sir Robert Herries and drawing some money, which being paid in heavy five-frank pieces, we found we could not carry, and therefore requested the banker to send, saying, "We live in the Place du Lion d'Or." Whereupon he looked surprised, and observed that he knew of no house there fit for us, "except, indeed," he added, "the one that has been long uninhabited on account of the _revenant_ that walks about it."
He said this quite seriously, and in a natural tone of voice; in spite of which we laughed, and were quite entertained at the idea of a ghost; but, at the same time, we begged him not to mention the thing to our servants, lest they should take any fancies into their heads; and my mother and I resolved to say nothing about the matter to anyone. "I suppose it is the ghost," said my mother, laughing, "that wakes us so often by walking over our heads." We had, in fact, been awakened several nights by a heavy foot, which we supposed to be that of one of the men-servants, of whom we had three English and four French. The English ones, men and women, every one of them, returned ultimately to England with us.
A night or two afterwards, being again awakened by the step, my mother asked Creswell: "Who slept in the room above us?" "No one, my lady," she replied, "it is a large empty garret."
About a week or ten days after this, Creswell came to my mother, one morning, and told her that all the French servants talked of going away, because there was a _revenant_ in the house; adding, that there seemed to be a strange story attached to the place, which was said, together with some other property, to have belonged to a young man, whose guardian, who was also his uncle, had treated him cruelly, and confined him in an iron cage; and as he had subsequently disappeared, it was conjectured he had been murdered. This uncle, after inheriting the property, had suddenly quitted the house, and sold it to the father of the man of whom we had hired it. Since that period, though it had been several times let, nobody had ever stayed in it above a week or two; and, for a considerable time past, it had had no tenant at all.