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welcome at the port of Marseille. There was an immediate debate about failings in the police protection provided for such a high-risk visit. (Publisher’s note)

IV
AT CHÂTEAU B—
    When we came out of Étampes station, the driver of an old-fashioned four-cylinder Colda called over to us.
    â€˜Superintendent Fourier?’
    â€˜That’s me!’
    â€˜I am Monsieur Breteuil’s chauffeur – he’s the examining magistrate. He sent me. He’s waiting for you at the château.’
    â€˜How considerate!’
    We drove for about three miles before reaching the entrance to the estate. Two sergeants were on duty, keeping an eye on the reporters and the curious who were crowding around the gates. Ever since the publication of the much-read article in Paris-Soir all comings and goings had been carefully checked in order to try to gather any snippets of information.
    The gates were opened to let us through and the car sped up the drive leading to the château.
    It was a charming manor house, a relic from a rich past – one of those houses that make the Île-de-France region so appealing today. The façade was fairly wide and two storeys high. Behind the imposing main body of the building were the narrow roofs of two medieval towers which could be seen from the direction of the village.
    In fact, the château hadn’t been built in the Middle Ages, but at the end of the sixteenth century and altered several times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One restoration project had left more of a mark than the others – there were signs that the frontof the building had been added to an older section at the back or had at least been rebuilt from top to bottom along more modern lines.
    As Superintendent Fourier had had time to explain to me on the journey, the Marquis de Brindillac had bought Château B— twenty years earlier to escape the hustle and bustle of the capital which had become unsuitable for the work he was carrying out.
    Auguste Jean Raoul de Brindillac had been born on 28 April 1862. His father, Ernest Léon Honoré, had been an army surgeon, who in 1859 had married Marquise Joséphine Amélie de la Batte, granddaughter of a general during the Empire. They had had three children: Honoré, Auguste and Joséphine. After the death of his first wife, Auguste de Brindillac had in 1899 married Sophie Mathilde Van Doorsen, heiress of a wealthy Dutch family originally from Haarlem, with whom he had had two children: René, who had died in a hunting accident in 1926, and Amélie.
    The Marquis de Brindillac, like his father before him, developed a vocation for surgery and anatomy very early on. He qualified as a doctor at the École de Médecine de Paris. An admirer of Bouillaud, and particularly Broca, he was passionate about physiology and the study of the human brain. He spent time at the laboratories of Marey, Berthelot and Vulpian. Following in the footsteps of Paul Broca, he focused his early scientific research on a better understanding of the limbic system or rhinencephalon, and on identifying the centre of speech in the brain. In 1894 he wrote a Clinical and Physiological Treatise on the Location of the Language Centre in the Brain which is still a standard work on the subject and led to him being elected to the Académie de Médecine de Paris in 1896. He was a professor of clinical medicine and physiology at the Hôpital de la Charité for a long time. The publication of his Clinical Treatise on Disorders of the Nervous System in 1909 definitively established his reputation as a leading scientist. In 1911 he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In November 1924, he was elected to theAcadémie des Sciences. The Marquis was without doubt one of the country’s greatest minds.
    The chauffeur parked on the drive, near the main entrance to the château, next to two saloon cars in the deep-blue colour of the