eleven o'clock in
the evening
When night closed in , the Abbe Brigaud arrived . The chevalier and he wrapped themselves in their mantles , and went toward the Palais Royal ; they had , it will be remembered , to examine the ground . The house in which Madame de Sabran lived , since her husband had been named maitre d'hotel to the regent , was No. 22 , between the Hotel de la Roche-Guyon and the passage formerly called Passage du Palais Royal , because it was the only one leading from the Rue des Bons Enfants to the Rue de Valois . This passage , now called Passage du Lycée , was closed at the same time as the other gates of the garden ; that is to say , at eleven o'clock in the evening ; therefore , having once entered a house in the Rue des Bons Enfants , unless it had a second door opening on the Rue de Valois , no one could return to the Palais Royal after eleven o'clock without making the round , either by the Rue Neuve des Petits-Champs , or by the Cour des Fontaines . Thus it was with Madame de Sabran 's house ; it was an exquisite little hotel , built toward the end of the last century , some five-and-twenty years before , by a merchant who wished to ape the great lords and have a petite maison of his own . It was a one-storied house , with a stone gallery , on which the servants ' attics opened , and surmounted by a low tilted roof . Under the first-floor windows was a large balcony which jutted out three or four feet , and extended right across the house ; but some iron ornaments , similar to the balcony , and which reached to the terrace , separated the two windows on each side from the three in the center , as is often done when it is desired to interrupt exterior communications .