Poissy is seventeen and a half miles west of Paris and can be reached by train or hired car. In the winter months, the train from Gare Saint-Lazare will be favored, as the roads may be icy in patches. The train winds through small suburban towns and hamlets before entering the Forêt de Saint-Germain, a dense, brooding expanse of woods where animal tracks can be seen in the snow on either side of the rails. At last the forest opens. There are some fields, silent and desolate under the snow, and then the first small houses, and then on the right of the track passengers will see the Seine, just a few dozens of yards away. The banks where week-end strollers bathe and take the sun in Spring and Summer are bleak and desolate, as in paintings by Seurat near Asnières. The punts and other barks shrouded and covered or half-filled with icy water.
On the left side of the track, the wooden platform overlooks a town square, and waiting passengers press on the ramp from the nearby café-restaurant of the Hôtel de Rouen, where they have been keeping warm. The town is bustling despite the cold, with the atmosphere of an American frontier-town, hedged in by the forest. Three-story houses, some recent, some dating from medieval times, flank the paved roads which gendarmes on horses patrol. One, a grocery, is proudly marked Depuis 1420. There are carts, a few cars, and a tramline to nearby Saint-Germain en Laye. In the streets the urchins play under the supervision of vigilant mothers hanging washing to dry. The town hall is a two-story building with a few colonnades around the porch-entrance.
At the town hall, the group finds an old clerck eager to tell about the history of the small town of Poissy. The Comte’s villa was a well-documented architectural oddity. Accounts describe it as a potpourri of architectural styles, ranging from classical Greek and medieval buttresses to fresh-built broken towers imitating Gothic ruins, similar to the English fashion of decorative ruins on country estates. The three story building had a dozen bedrooms, a ballroom, and numerous sitting rooms. There´s a set of plans made by a Parisian builder and detail the layout of the house, down-leading stairs indicating the existence of an unmapped cellar area. A cameo etching of the mansion’s front view exists. The lines of the building are subtly crazed and seem not to be the product of a rational mind.
To get to the site, investigators must retrace their steps towards the station in the direction of the Church, passing near a large and grim building. The erstwhile Convent of the Ursulines is now a prison, the Maison d’Arrêt de Poissy. Wives and families of those imprisoned may be waiting outside in the cold for a chance to get a visit in the parlor.
The investigators pass the Church, the Collégiale Notre-Dame de Poissy, built 1130-1140 AD. It contains the worn font of Saint-Louis, worn from the belief that scrapings from the fontwhen drunk with water would cure fevers. The font is encircled by spikes of forged and twisted metal and is rather forbidding. Passing though a stone archway into what was once the enclosure of the Abbey of the Dominicaines, a priory, they find they are now walking up cobbled streets, insulated from the hustle and bustle of the modern town, surrounded by older houses and mansions, on the outskirts of a large park with age-old trees. The investigators feel as though they have stepped back in time.
Eventually, they get to the house of the Lorien family, as the clerck had informed them. The house is surrounded by a large crumbling brick wall, obviously of 18th century work. The walls are in-part supported by massive climbing rose bushes which cover them. The roses would be incredibly beautiful in the spring, their perfume filling the area. In winter they are grim and forbidding, having been pruned back and resembling twisted and knotted barbed wire. Through the gateway a small, two-storied brick house can be seen. Smoke rises from the chimney, and a warm, comforting light fi lls the downstairs rooms. The razed mansion of Comte Fenalik once stood where the small home now waits.
