"Yes," said M. Ginory, "perfectly, I know your system. You will hold to it. It is well. Now, whose portrait is that?"
"It is mine!"
"By whom do you think it was possible that it could have been sold in the bric-a-brac shop where it was found."
"I know nothing about it. Probably by the one who found it or stole it from M. Rovère's apartment, and who is probably, without the least doubt, his assassin."
"That seems very simple to you?"
"It seems very logical."
"Suppose that this should be the exact truth, that does not detract from the presumption which implicates you, and from Mme. Moniche's deposition, which charges you"——
"Yes, yes, I know. The open safe, the papers spread out, the tête-à-tête with Rovère, when the concierge entered the room—that signifies nothing!"
"For you, perhaps! For Justice it has a tragic signification. But let us return to the portrait. It was you, I suppose, who gave it to Rovère?"
"Yes, it was I," Dantin responded. "Rovère was an amateur in art, moreover, my intimatefriend. I had no family, I had an old friend, a companion of my youth, whom I thought would highly prize that painting. It is a fine one—it is by Paul Baudry."
"Ah!" said M. Ginory. "P. B. Those are Baudry's initials?"
"Certainly. After the war—when I had done my duty like others, I say this without any intention of defending myself—Paul Baudry was at Bordeaux. He was painting some portraits on panels, after Holbein—Edmond About's among others. He made mine. It is this one which I gave Rovère—the one you hold in your hands."
The Magistrate looked at the small oval painting and M. Leriche put on his eyeglasses to examine the quality of the painting. A Baudry!
"What are these scratches around the edge as if nails had been drawn across the places?" M. Ginory asked. He held out the portrait to Dantin.
"I do not know. Probably where the frame was taken off."
"No, no! They are rough marks; I can see that. The picture has been literally torn from the frame. You ought to know how this panel was framed."
"Very simply when I gave it to Rovère. A narrow gilt frame, nothing more."
"Had Rovère changed the frame?"
"I do not know. I do not remember. When I was at his apartment the last few times I do not remember to have seen the Baudry. I have thought of it, but I have no recollection of it."
"Then you cannot furnish any information about the man who sold this portrait?"
"None whatever!"
"We might bring you face to face with that woman."
"So be it! She certainly would not recognize me."
"In any case, she will tell us about the man who brought the portrait to her."
"She might describe him to me accurately, and even paint him for me," said Dantin quickly. "She can neither insinuate that I know him nor prove to you that I am his accomplice. I do not know who he is nor from where he comes. I was even ignorant of his existence myself a quarter of an hour ago."
"I have only to remand you to your cell," said the Magistrate. "We will hunt for the other man."
Dantin, in his turn, said in an ironical tone: "And you will do well!"
M. Ginory made a sign. The guards led out their prisoner. Then, looking at the Chief, while Bernardet still remained standing like a soldier near the window, the Magistrate said:
"Until there are new developments, Dantin will say nothing. We must look for the man in the sombrero."
"Necessarily!" said M. Leriche.
"The needle! The needle! And the hay stack!" thought Bernardet.
The Chief, smiling, turned toward him. "That belongs to you, Bernardet."
"I know it well," said the little man, "but it is not easy. Oh! It is not easy at all."
"Bah! you have unearthed more difficult things than that. Do it up brown! There is only one clew—the hat"——
"They are not uncommon, those hats, Monsieur Leriche—they are not very bad hats. But yet it is a clew—if we live, we shall see."
He stood motionless between the bookcase and the window, like a soldier carrying arms, while M. Ginory, shaking his head, said to the chief: "And this Dantin, what impression did he make on you?"
"He is a little crack-brained!" replied the Chief.
"Certainly! But guilty—you believe him guilty?"
"Without doubt!"
"Would you condemn him?" he quickly asked as he gazed searchingly at the Chief. M. Leriche hesitated.
"Would you condemn him?" M. Ginory repeated, insistently.
The Chief still hesitated a moment, glanced toward the impassive Bernardet without being able to read his face, and he said:
"I do not know."
"I donot know," thought Bernardet as he returned home. "What one knows very well indeed, what one cannot deny, oh, that would be impossible! is that on the retina of the dead man's eye, reflected there at the supreme moment of the agony, is found the image of this Dantin, his face, his features; this man, in a word, denounced by this witness which is worth all other witnesses in the world! This assassinated man cast a last look upon his murderer as he called for aid; a last cry for 'Help!' in the death rattle!—and this man says: 'I do not know!' But the dead man knew; and the kodak knows, also. It has no passion, no anger, no hate, because it registers what passes; fixes that which is fleeting!"
Bernardet was obstinate in his conviction. He was perfectly rooted in it. What if he had not persisted in believing that photography would reveal the truth? What weighty reason, what even acceptable one was there which obliged Dantin to remain silent in the presence of the Examining Magistrate and his registrar—in the secret interview of an examination—when in order to escape a prison, an accusation, he had only tospeak two words? But if Dantin said nothing, was it because he had nothing to say? If he had given no explanation, was it because he had none to give? An innocent man does not remain silent. If at the instant when M. Ginory pressed the ivory button the other day, if the man had been able to defend himself, would he not have done it? One knew the secret reason of criminals for keeping silent. Their best reason is their guilt.
Only, it seemed now certain that Dantin, although guilty, had an accomplice. Yes, without doubt, the man with the sombrero, the seller of the portrait. Where could he now be in hiding?
"Not easy," Bernardet repeated the words: "Not easy; no, not easy at all to run him out of his rabbit hutch."
The Woman in Black, the visitor, would be another important clue. On this side the situation seemed a simple one. Or was this woman also an accomplice, and would she remain silent, hidden in the Province? Or would the death of Rovère draw her to Paris, where she might be recognized and become a witness for Justice?
But the days passed. What was called the mystery of the Boulevard de Clichy continued to interest and excite the public. Violent and perplexing Parliamentary discussions could not distract attention from a crime committed in broaddaylight, almost as one might say, in the street, and which made one doubt the security of the city, the efficiency of the police. The fall of a Ministry, predicted each morning and anticipated in advance, could not thrust aside morbid interest in this murder. The death of the ex-Consul was a grand actuality!
Jacques Dantin thus became a dramatic personage; the reporters created legends about him; some declared him guilty and brought up in support of their conviction some anecdotes, some tales from the clubs, given as proofs; others asked if the suppositions were sufficiently well based to accuse a man in advance of trial, and these latter ardently took up his defense. Paul Rodier had even, with much dexterity and eloquence, diplomatically written two articles, one on either side of the question.
"It is," he said to himself, "the sure way of having told the truth on one side or the other."
Bernardet did not renounce for an instant the hope of finding the man who had sold the picture. It was not the first time that he had picked the needle from a cartful of hay. Paris is large, but this human sea has its particular currents, as the ocean has special tides, and the police officer knew it well. Here or there, some day he would meet the man, cast up by the torrent like a waif.
First of all, the man was probably a strangerfrom some foreign land. Wearing a hat like a Spaniard, he had not had time to change the style of dress of the country from which he had come in search of adventures. Bernardet haunted the hotels, searched the registers, made conversation with the lodgers. He found poor persons who had come from foreign countries, but whose motives for coming to Paris were all right. Bernardet never stopped searching a moment; he went everywhere, curious and prying—and it pleased him, when he found a leisure evening, to go to some of the strange wine shops or ale houses (called cabarets) to find subjects for observation. These cabarets are very numerous on the outskirts of Montmartre, in the streets and boulevards at the foot of the Butte. Bizarre inventions, original and disagreeable creations, where the ingenuity of the enterprisers sometimes made them hideous in order to attract; to cater to the idle, and to hold the loungers from among the higher classes. Cabarets born of the need for novelty, which might stimulate the blasé; the demand for something eccentric almost to morbid irony. ADanse Macabretrod to the measures of an operetta; pleasantries of the bunglers adopting the cure-alls of the saw-bones, and juggling with their empty heads while dreaming the dreams of a Hamlet.
Cabaret du Squelette!
The announcement of the droll promises—apparitions,visions, phantoms—had often made him smile when he passed near there to go to the Préfecture; this wineshop, the front of which was bordered with black, like a letter announcing a death, and which bore, grating as it swung at the end of an iron rod, a red lantern for a sign.
His little girls, when he laughingly spoke of the cabaret where the waiters were dressed like undertakers' assistants, turned pale, and plump little Mme. Bernardet, ordinarily smiling, would say with a sigh: "Is it possible that such sacrilegious things are permitted in the quarter?"
Bernardet good-naturedly replied: "Ah, my dear, where is the harm?"
"I know what I am talking about," his good wife said; "they are the pleasure of the unhealthy minded. They mock at death as they mock at everything else. Where will it all end? We shall see it"——
"Or we shall not see it," interrupted her husband, laughingly.
He went in there one evening, having a little time to himself, as he would have gone into a theatre. He knew something about this Cabaret du Squelette (meaning the wine shop of the skeleton). He found the place very droll.
A small hall which had a few months before been a common wine shop had been transformed into a lugubrious place. The walls were painted a deadblack, and were hung with a large number of paintings—scenes from masked balls, gondola parades, serenades with a balcony scene, some of the lovers' rendezvous of Venice and an ideal view of Granada, with couples gazing at each other and sighing in the gondolas on the lagoons, or in the Andalusian courts—and in this strange place with its romantic pictures, souvenirs of Musset or of Carlo Gozzi, the tables were made in the form of coffins with lighted candles standing upon them, and the waiters were dressed as undertakers' assistants, with shiny black hats trimmed with crape, on their heads.
"What poison will you drink before you die?" asked one of the creatures of Bernardet.
Bernardet sat and gazed about him. A few "high-flyers" from the other side of Paris were there. Here and there a thief from that quarter sat alone at a table. Some elegants in white cravats, who had come there in correct evening dress, were going later, after the opera, to sup with some première. The police officer understood very well why the blasé came there. They wished to jog their jaded appetites; they sought to find somepiment, a curry, spice to season the tameness of their daily existence. The coffin-shaped tables upon which they leaned their elbows amused them. Several of them had asked for abavaroise, as they were on milk diet.
They pointed out to each other the gas flaming from the jets fashioned in the form of a broken shin-bone.
"A little patience, my friends," said a sort of manager, who was dressed in deep mourning. "Before long we will adjourn to the Cave of Death!"
The drinkers in white cravats shouted. Bernardet experienced, on the contrary, what Mme. Bernardet would have called a "creepy" sensation. Seasoned as he was to the bloody and villainous aspect of crime, he felt the instinctive shrinking of a healthy and level-headed bourgeois against these drolleries of the brain-diseased upper class and the pleasantries of the blasé decadents.
At a certain moment, and after an explanation given by the manager, the gas was turned off, and the lovers in the gondolas, the guitar players, the singers of Spanish songs, the dancers infatuated with the Moulin Rouge, changed suddenly in sinister fashion. In place of the blond heads and rosy cheeks, skulls appeared; the smiles became grins which showed the teeth in their fleshless gums. The bodies, clothed in doublets, in velvets and satins, a moment ago, were made by some interior illumination to change into hideous skeletons. In his mocking tones the manager explained and commented on the metamorphosis, adding to the funeral spectacle the pleasantry of a buffoon.
"See! diseased Parisians, what you will be on Sunday!"
The light went out suddenly; the skeletons disappeared; the sighing lovers in the gondolas on the lagoons of Venice reappeared; the Andalusian sweethearts again gazed into each other's eyes and sang their love songs. Some of the women laughed, but the laughs sounded constrained.
"Droll! this city of Paris," Bernardet thought. He sat there, leaning back against the wall, where verses about death were printed among the white tears—as in those lodges of Free Masons where an outsider is shut up in order to give him time to make his will—when the door opened and Bernardet saw a tall young man of stalwart and resolute mien enter. A black, curly beard surrounded his pale face. As he entered he cast a quick glance around the hall, the air of which was rather thick with cigar smoke. He seemed to be about thirty years of age, and had the air of an artist, a sculptor, or a painter, together with something military in his carriage. But what suddenly struck Bernardet was his hat, a large gray, felt hat, with a very wide brim, like the sombreros which the bull fighters wear.
Possibly, a few people passing through Paris might be found wearing such hats. But they would probably be rare, and in order to find theseller of Jacques Dantin's portrait, Bernardet had only this one clew.
"Oh! such a mean, little, weak, clew! But one must use it, just the same!" Bernardet had said.
What if this young man with the strange hat was, by chance, the unknown for whom he was seeking? It was not at all probable. No, when one thought of it—not at all probable. But truth is sometimes made up of improbabilities, and Bernardet again experienced the same shock, the instinctive feeling that he had struck the trail, which he felt when the young man entered the wine shop.
"That hat!" murmured Bernardet, sipping his wine and stealing glances over the rim of his glass at the young man. The unknown seemed to play directly into the police officer's hand. After standing by the door a few moments, and looking about the place, he walked over to the coffin-shaped table at which Bernardet was seated, bringing himself face to face with the officer. One of the waiters in his mourning dress came to take his order, and lighted another candle, which he placed where its rays fell directly on the young man's face. Thus Bernardet was able to study him at his ease. The pale face, with its expression, uneasy and slightly intense, struck Bernardet at once. That white face, with its black beard, with its gleaming eyes, was not to be passed by with a casual glance. The waiter placed a glass of brandy before him; heplaced his elbows on the table and leaned his chin upon his hands. He was evidently not a habitué of the place nor a resident of the quarter. There was something foreign about his appearance. His glance was steady, as that of one who searches the horizon, looks at running water, contemplates the sea, asking for some "good luck" of the unknown.
"It would be strange," thought Bernardet, "if a simple hat and no other clew should put us upon the track of the man for whom we are searching."
At once, with the ingenuity of a master of dramatic art, the agent began to plot, and to put into action what lawyers, pleading and turning and twisting a cause this way and that, callan effect. He waited until the manager informed them that they were about to pass into the Cave of Death, and gave them all an invitation into the adjoining hall; then, profiting by the general movement, he approached the unknown, and, almost shoulder to shoulder, he walked along beside him, through a narrow, dark passage to a little room, where, on a small stage stood, upright, an empty coffin.
It was a doleful spectacle, which the Cabaret du Squelette (the wine shop of the skeleton) offered to its clientèle of idle loungers and morbid curiosity seekers attracted to its halls by these exhibitions. Bernardet knew it all very well, and he knew by just what play of lights, what common chemical illuminations, they gave to the lookers on the sinisterillusion of the decomposition of a corpse in its narrow home. This phantasmagoria, to which the people from the Boulevard came, in order to be amused, he had seen many times in the little theatres in the fairs at Neuilly. The proprietor of the cabaret had explained it to him; he had been curious and very keen about it, and so he followed the crowd into this little hall, to look once more at the image of a man in the coffin. He knew well to what purpose he could put it. The place was full. Men and women were standing about; the black walls made the narrow place look still smaller. Occasional bizarre pleasantries were heard and nervous laughs rang out. Why is it, that no matter how sceptical people may be, the idea, the proximity, the appearance of death gives them an impression of uneasiness, a singular sensation which is often displayed in nervous laughs or sepulchral drolleries?
Bernardet had not left the side of the young man with the gray felt hat. He could see his face distinctly in the light of the little hall, and could study it at his ease. In the shadows which lurked about them the young man's face seemed like a white spot. The officer's sharp eyes never left it for a moment.
The manager now asked if some one would try the experiment. This was to step into the open coffin—that box, as he said—"from which yourfriends, your neighbors, can see you dematerialize and return to nothingness."
"Come, my friends," he continued, in his ironical tones, "this is a fine thing; it will permit your best friends to see you deliquesce! Are there any married people here? It is only a question of tasting, in advance, the pleasures of a widowhood. Would you like to see your husband disappear, my sister? My brother, do you wish to see your wife decompose? Sacrifice yourselves, I beg of you! Come! Come up here! Death awaits you!"
They laughed, but here and there a laugh sounded strident or hysterical; the laugh did not ring true, but had the sound of cracked crystal. No one stirred. This parody of death affected even these hardened spectators.
"Oh, well, my friends, there is a cadaver belonging to the establishment which we can use. It is a pity! You may readily understand that we do not take the dead for companions."
As no one among the spectators would enter the coffin, the manager, with a gesture, ordered one of the supernumeraries of the cabaret to enter; from an open door the figurant glided across the stage and entered the coffin, standing upright. The manager wrapped him about with a shroud, leaving only the pale face of the pretended dead man exposed above this whiteness. The man smiled.
"He laughs, Messieurs, he laughs still!" saidthe manager. "You will soon see him pay for that laugh. 'Rome rit et mourut!' as Bossuet said."
Some of the audience shouted applause to this quotation from a famous author. Bernardet did not listen; he was studying from a corner of his eye his neighbor's face. The man gazed with a sort of fascination at this fantastic performance which was taking place before him. He frowned, he bit his lips; his eyes were almost ferocious in expression. The figurant in the coffin continued to laugh.
"Look! look keenly!" went on the manager, "you will see your brother dematerialize after becoming changed in color. The flesh will disappear and you will see his skeleton. Think, think, my brothers, this is the fate which awaits you, perhaps, soon, on going away from here; think of the various illnesses and deaths by accidents which await you! Contemplate the magic spectacle offered by the Cabaret du Squelette and remember that you are dust and that to dust you must return! Make, wisely, this reflection, which the intoxicated man made to another man in like condition, but asleep. 'And that is how I shall be on Sunday!' While waiting, my brothers and sisters, for nothingness, look at the dematerialization of your contemporary if you please!"
The play of lights, while the man was talking,began to throw a greenish pallor and to make spots at first transparent upon the orbits of the eyes, then, little by little, the spots seemed to grow stronger, to blacken, to enlarge. The features, lightly picked out, appeared to change gradually, to take on gray and confused tints, to slowly disappear as under a veil, a damp vapor which covered, devoured that face, now unrecognizable! It has been said that the manner in which this phenomenon was managed was a remarkable thing; it is true, for this human body seemed literally to dissolve before this curious crowd, now become silent and frightened. The work of death was accomplished there publicly, thanks to the illusion of lighting. The livid man who smiled a few moments before was motionless, fixed, then passing through some singular changes, the flesh seemed to fall from him in——
Suddenly the play of lights made him disappear from the eyes of the spectators and they saw, thanks to reflections made by mirrors, only a skeleton. It was the world of spectres and the secret of the tombs revealed to the crowd by a kind of scientific magic lantern.
Bernardet did not desire to wait longer to strike his blow—this was the exact moment to do it—the psychological moment!
The eager look of the man in the sombrero revealed a deep trouble. There was in this looksomething more than the curiosity excited by a novel spectacle. The muscles of his pale face twitched as with physical suffering; in his eyes Bernardet read an internal agony.
"Ah!" thought the police officer, "the living eye is a book which one can read, as well as a dead man's eye."
Upon the stage the lights were rendering even more sinister the figurant who was giving to this morbidly curious crowd the comedy of death. One would have now thought it was one of those atrocious paintings made in the studios of certain Spanish painters in theputrideroof a Valles Leal. The flesh, by a remarkable scientific combination of lights, was made to seem as if falling off, and presented the horrible appearance of a corpse in a state of decomposition. The lugubrious vision made a very visible shudder pass over the audience. Then Bernardet, drawing himself up to his full height so as to get a good view of the face of this man so much taller, and approaching as near to him as possible, in fact, so that his elbow and upper arm touched the young man's, he slowly, deliberately dropped, one by one, these words:
"That is about how M. Rovère ought to be now"——
And suddenly the young man's face expressed a sensation of fright, as one sees in the face of a pedestrianwho suddenly finds that he is about to step upon a viper.
"Or how he will be soon!" added the little man, with an amiable smile. Bernardet dissimulated under this amiability an intense joy. Holding his arm and elbow in an apparently careless manner close to his neighbor as he pronounced Rovère's name, Bernardet felt his neighbor's whole body tremble, and that he gave a very perceptible start. Why had he been so quickly moved by an unknown name if it had not recalled to his mind some frightful thought? The man might, of course, know, as the public did, all the details of the crime, but, with his strong, energetic face, his resolute look, he did not appear like a person who would be troubled by the recital of a murder, the description of a bloody affray, or even by the frightful scene which had just passed before his eyes in the hall.
"A man of that stamp is not chicken-hearted," thought Bernardet. "No! no!" Hearing those words evoked the image of the dead man, Rovère; the man was not able to master his violent emotion, and he trembled, as if under an electrical discharge. The shudder had been violent, of short duration, however, as if he had mastered his emotion by his strong will. In his involuntary movement he had displayed a tragic eloquence. Bernardet had seen in the look, in the gesture, in the movement of theman's head, something of trouble, of doubt, of terror, as in a flash of lightning in the darkness of night one sees the bottom of a pool.
Bernardet smilingly said to him:
"This sight is not a gay one!"
"No," the man answered, and he also attempted to smile.
He looked back to the stage, where the sombre play went on.
"That poor Rovère!" Bernardet said.
The other man now looked at Bernardet as if to read his thoughts and to learn what signification the repetition of the same name had. Bernardet sustained, with a naïve look, this mute interrogation. He allowed nothing of his thoughts to be seen in the clear, childlike depths of his eyes. He had the air of a good man, frightened by a terrible murder, and who spoke of the late victim as if he feared for himself. He waited, hoping that the man would speak.
In some of Bernardet's readings he had come across the magic rule applicable to love: "Never go! Wait for the other to come!"—"Nec ire, fac venire"—applicable also to hate, to that duel of magnetism between the hunted man and the police spy, and Bernardet waited for the other to "come!"
Brusquely, after a silence, while on the little stage the transformation was still going on, the man asked in a dry tone:
"Why do you speak to me of M. Rovère?"
Bernardet affably replied: "I? Because every one talks of it. It is the actuality of the moment. I live in that quarter. It was quite near there that it happened, the affair"——
"I know!" interrupted the other.
The unknown had not pronounced ten words in questioning and replying, and yet Bernardet found two clues simply insignificant—terrible in reality. "I know!" was the man's reply, in a short tone, as if he wished to push aside, to thrust away, a troublesome thought. The tone, the sound of the words, had struck Bernardet. But one word especially—the word Monsieur before Rovère's name. "Monsieur Rovère? Why did he speak to me of Monsieur Rovère?" Bernardet thought.
It seemed, then, that he knew the dead man.
All the people gathered in this little hall, if asked in regard to this murder would have said: "Rovère!" "The Rovère affair!" "The Rovère murder!" Not one who had not known the victim would have said:
"Monsieur Rovère!"
The man knew him then. This simple word, in the officer's opinion, meant much.
The manager now announced that, having become a skeleton, the dear brother who had lent himself to this experiment would return to his natural state, "fresher and rosier than before."He added, pleasantly, "A thing which does not generally happen to ordinary skeletons!"
This vulgar drollery caused a great laugh, which the audience heartily indulged in. It made an outlet for their pent-up feelings, and they all felt as if they had awakened from a nightmare. The man in the sombrero, whose pale face was paler than before, was the only one who did not smile. He even frowned fiercely (noted by Bernardet) when the manager added:
"You are not in the habit of seeing a dead man resuscitated the next day. Between us, it would keep the world pretty full."
"Evidently," thought Bernardet, "my young gentleman is ill at ease."
His only thought was to find out his name, his personality, to establish his identity and to learn where he had spent his life, and especially his last days. But how?
He did not hesitate long. He left the place, even before the man in the coffin had reappeared, smiling at the audience. He glided through the crowd, repeating, "Pardon!" "I beg pardon!" traversed rapidly the hall where newcomers were conversing over their beverages, and stepped out into the street, looked up and down. A light fog enveloped everything, and the gaslights and lights in the shop windows showed ghostly through it.The passers-by, the cabs, the tramways, bore a spectral look.
What Bernardet was searching for was a policeman. He saw two chatting together and walking slowly along under the leafless trees. In three steps, at each step turning his head to watch the people coming out of the cabaret, he reached the men. While speaking to them he did not take his eyes from the door of that place where he had left the young man in the gray felt hat.
"Dagonin," he said, "you must follow me, if you please, and 'pull me in!' I am going to pick a drunken quarrel with a particular person. Interfere and arrest us both. Understand?"
"Perfectly," Dagonin replied.
He looked at his comrade, who carried his hand to his shako and saluted Bernardet.
The little man who had given his directions in a quick tone, was already far away. He stood near the door of the cabaret gazing searchingly at each person who came out. The looks he cast were neither direct, menacing nor even familiar. He had pulled his hat down to his eyebrows, and he cast side glances at the crowd pouring from the door of the wine shop.
He was astonished that the man in the sombrero had not yet appeared. Possibly he had stopped, on his way out, in the front hall. Glancing through the open door, Bernardet saw that he was right.The young man was seated at one of those coffin-shaped oaken tables, with a glass of greenish liquor before him. "He needs alcohol to brace him up," growled the officer.
The door was shut again.
"I can wait till he has finished his absinthe," said Bernardet to himself.
He had not long to wait. After a small number of persons had left the place, the door opened and the man in the gray felt hat appeared, stopped on the threshold, and, as Bernardet had done, scanned the horizon and the street. Bernardet turned his back and seemed to be walking away from the wine shop, leaving the man free. With a keen glance or two over his shoulder toward him, Bernardet crossed the street and hurried along at a rapid pace, in order to gain on the young man, and by this manœuvre to find himself directly in front of the unknown. The man seemed to hesitate, walked quickly down the Boulevard a few steps toward the Place Pigalle, in the direction where Rovère's apartments were, but suddenly stopped, turned on his heel, repassed the Cabaret du Squelette, and went toward the Moulin Rouge, which at first, Bernardet thought, he was about to enter. As he stood there the vanes of the Moulin Rouge, turning about, lighted up the windows of the opposite buildings and made them look as if they were on fire. At last, obeying another impulse, hesuddenly crossed the Boulevard, as if to return into Paris, leaving Montmartre, the cabarets, and Rovère's house behind him. He walked briskly along, and ran against a man—a little man—whom he had not noticed, who seemed to suddenly detach himself from the wall, and who fell against his breast, hiccoughing and cursing in vicious tones.
"Imbecile!"
The young man wished to push away the intoxicated man who, with hat over his eyes, clung to him and kept repeating:
"The street—the street—is it not free—the street?"
Yes, it was certainly a drunken man. Not a man in a smock, but a little fellow, a bourgeois, with hat askew and thick voice.
"I—I am not stopping you. The street is free—I tell you!"
"Well, if it is free, I want it!"
The voice was vigorous, but showed sudden anger, a strident tone, a slight foreign accent, Spanish, perhaps.
The drunken man probably thought him insolent for, still hiccoughing, he answered:
"Oh, you want it, do you? You want it? I want it! The king says 'we wish!' don't you know?"
With another movement, he lost his equilibriumand half fell, his head hanging over, and he clutched the man he held in a sudden embrace.
"It is mine also—the street—you know!"
With sudden violence, the man disembarrassed himself of this caressing creature; he thrust aside his clinging arms with a movement so quick and strong that the intoxicated man, this time, fell, his hat rolled into the gutter, and he lay on the sidewalk.
But immediately, with a bound, he was on his feet, and as the man went calmly on his way, he followed him, seized his coat and clutched him so tightly that he could not proceed.
"Pardon;" he said, "you cannot go away like that!"
Then, as the light from a gas lamp fell on the little man's face, the young man recognized his neighbor of the cabaret, who had said to him:
"See, that is how Rovère must look!"
At this moment, Dagonin and his comrade appeared on the scene and laid vigorous hands on them both; the young man made a quick, instinctive movement toward his right pocket, where, no doubt, he kept a revolver or knife. Bernardet seized his wrist, he twisted it and said:
"Do nothing rash!"
The young man was very strong, but the huge Dagonin had Herculean biceps and the other mandid not lack muscles. Fright, moreover, seemed to paralyze this tall, young gallant, who, as he saw that he was being hustled toward a police station, demanded:
"Have you arrested me, and why?"
"First for having struck me," Bernardet replied, still bareheaded, and to whom a gamin now handed his soiled hat, saying to him:
"Is this yours, Monsieur Bernardet?"
Bernardet recognized in his own quarter! That was glory!
The man seemed to wish to defend himself and still struggled, but one remark of Dagonin's seemed to pacify him:
"No rebellion! There is nothing serious about your arrest. Do not make it worse."
The young man really believed that it was only a slight matter and he would be liberated at once. The only thing that disquieted him was that this intoxicated man, suddenly become sober, had spoken to him as he did a few moments before in the cabaret.
The four men walked quickly along in the shadow of the buildings, through the almost deserted streets, where the shopkeepers were putting out their lights and closing up their shops. Scarcely any one who met them would have realized that three of these men were taking the fourth to a police station.
A tri-color flag floated over a door lighted by a red lantern; the four men entered the place and found themselves in a narrow, warm hall, where the agents of the police were either sleeping on benches or reading around the stove by the light of the gas jets above their heads.
Bernardet, looking dolefully at his broken and soiled hat, begged the young man to give his name and address to the Chief of the Post. The young man then quickly understood that his questioner of the Cabaret du Squelette had caught him in a trap. He looked at him with an expression of violent anger—of concentrated rage.
Then he said:
"My name? What do you want of that? I am an honest man. Why did you arrest me? What does it mean?"
"Your name?" repeated Bernardet.
The man hesitated.
"Oh, well! I am called Pradès. Does that help you any?"
The man wrote: "Pradès. P-r-a-d-è-s with an accent. Pradès. First name?"
"Charles, if you wish!"
"Oh!" said Bernardet, noticing the slight difference in the tone of his answer. "We wish nothing. We wish only the truth."
"I have told it."
Charles Pradès furnished some further informationin regard to himself. He was staying at a hotel in the Rue de Paradis-Poissonsière, a small hotel used by commercial travelers and merchants of the second class. He had been in Paris only a month.
Where was he from? He said that he came from Sydney, where he was connected with a commercial house. Or rather he had given up the situation to come to Paris to seek his fortune. But while speaking of Sydney he had in his rather rambling answers let fall the name of Buenos Ayres, and Bernardet remembered that Buenos Ayres was the place where M. Rovère had been French Consul. The officer paid no attention to this at the time. For what good? Pradès's real examination would be conducted by M. Ginory. He, Bernardet, was not an examining magistrate. He was the ferret who hunted out criminals.
This Pradès was stupefied, then furious, when, the examination over, he learned that he was not to be immediately set at liberty.
What! An absurd quarrel, a collision without a wound, in a street in Paris, was sufficient to hold a man and make him pass the night in the station house, with all the vagabonds of both sexes collected there!
"You may bemoan your fate to yourself to-morrow morning!" said Bernardet.
In the meantime they searched this man, who,very pale, making visibly powerful efforts to control himself, biting his lips and his black beard, while they examined his pocketbook, while they looked at a Spanish knife with a short blade, which he had (Bernardet had divined it at the time of his arrest) in his right pocket.
The pocketbook revealed nothing. It contained some receipted weekly bills of the hotel in the Rue de Paradis, some envelopes without letters, without stamps and bearing the name, "Charles Pradès, Merchant," two bank bills of 100 francs—nothing more.
Bernardet very simply asked Pradès how it was that he had upon his person addressed letters which he evidently had not received, as they were not stamped. He replied:
"They are not letters. They are addresses which I gave instead of visiting cards, as I had not had time to procure cards."
"Then the addresses are in your writing?"
"Yes," Pradès answered.
The police officer looked at them again; then, saluting the brigadier and his men, wished them good-night, and even added a little gesture, rather mocking, in the direction of the arrested man. Pradès made an angry, almost menacing, movement toward Bernardet. The guards standing about pulled him back, while the plump, smilinglittle man, caressing his sandy mustache and humming a tune, went out into the street.
As he reached the passage which led to his house this couplet came merrily from his lips as walked quickly along:
"Prends ton fusil, Gregoire,Prends ta gourde pourboire,Nos Messieurs sont partisA la chasse aux perdrix."
One would have taken M. Bernardet for a happy little bourgeois, going home from some theatre through the deserted streets and repeating a verse from some vaudeville, rather than a police spy who had just secured a prize. He walked quickly, he walked gaily. He reached his home, where Mme. Bernardet, always rosy and pleasant, awaited him, and where his three little girls were sleeping. He felt that, like the Roman emperor, he had not lost his day.
He again hummed the quatrain, and, although not in a loud tone, still it sounded like a far off fanfare of victory in the gray fog of this Paris night.
M. Ginorywas not without uneasiness when he thought of the detention of Jacques Dantin. Without doubt, all prisoners, all accused persons are reticent; they try to hide their guilt under voluntary silence. They do not speak, because they have sworn not to. They are bound, one knows not by whom, by an oath which they cannot break. It is the ordinary system of the guilty who cannot defend themselves. Mystery seems to them safety.
But Dantin, intimately acquainted with Rovère's life, might be acquainted with some secret which he could not disclose and which did not pertain to him at all. What secret? Had not an examining magistrate a right to know everything? Had not an accused man a right to speak? Either Dantin had nothing to reveal and he was playing a comedy and was guilty, or, if by a few words, by a confidence made to the magistrate he could escape an accusation, recover his liberty, without doubt he would speak after having kept an inexplicable silence. How could one suppose that an innocentman would hold, for a long time, to this mute system?
The discovery of the portrait in Mme. Colard's shop ought, naturally, to give to the affair a new turn. The arrest of Charles Pradès brought an important element to these researches. He would be examined by M. Ginory the next morning, after having been questioned by the Commissary of Police.
Bernardet, spruce, freshly shaven, was there, and seemed in his well-brushed redingote, like a little abbé come to assist at some curious ceremony.
On the contrary, Pradès, after a sleepless night, a night of agony, paler than the evening before, his face fierce and its muscles contracted, had a haggard expression, and he blinked his eyes like a night bird suddenly brought into glaring sunlight. He repeated before the Examining Magistrate what he had said to the brigadier. But his voice, vibrant a few hours before, had become heavy, almost raucous, as the haughty expression of his face had become sullen and tragic.
The Examining Magistrate had cited Mme. Colard, the shopkeeper, to appear before him. She instantly recognized in this Pradès the man who had sold her the little panel by Paul Baudry.
He denied it. He did not know of what theywere talking. He had never seen this woman. He knew nothing about any portrait.
"It belonged to M. Rovère," the magistrate replied, "M. Rovère, the murdered man; M. Rovère, who was consul at Buenos Ayres, and you spoke, yesterday, of Buenos Ayres, in the examination at the station house in the Rue de la Rochefoucauld."
"M. Rovère? Buenos Ayres?" repeated the young man, rolling his sombrero around his fingers.
He repeated that he did not know the ex-Consul, that he had never been in South America, that he had come from Sydney.
Bernardet, at this moment, interrupted him by taking his hat from him without saying a word, and Pradès cast a very angry look at the little man.
M. Ginory understood Bernardet's move and approved with a smile. He looked in the inside of the sombrero which Bernardet handed to him.
The hat bore the address of Gordon, Smithson & Co., Berner Street, London.
"But, after all," thought the Magistrate, "Buenos Ayres is one of the markets for English goods."
"That is a hat bought at Sydney," Pradès (who had understood) explained.
Before the bold, decided, almost violent affirmationswhich Mme. Colard made that this was certainly the seller of the portrait, the young man lost countenance a little. He kept saying over and over: "You deceive yourself. Madame, I have never spoken to you, I have never seen you."
When M. Ginory asked her if she still persisted in saying that this was the man who had sold her the picture, she said:
"Do I still persist? With my neck under the guillotine I would persist," and she kept repeating: "I am sure of it! I am sure of it!"
This preliminary examination brought about no decisive result. It was certain that, if this portrait had been in the possession of this young man and been sold by him, that he, Charles Pradès, was an accomplice of Dantin's, if not the author of the crime. They ought, then, to be brought face to face, and, possibly, this might bring about an immediate result. And why not have this meeting take place at once, before Pradès was sent where Dantin was, at Mazas?
M. Ginory, who had uttered this word "Mazas," noticed the expression of terror which flashed across and suddenly transfigured the young man's face.
Pradès stammered:
"Then—you will hold me? Then—I am not free?"
M. Ginory did not reply. He gave an order that this Pradès should be guarded until the arrival of Dantin from Mazas.
In Mazas, in that walled prison, in the cell which had already made him ill, Jacques Dantin sat. This man, with the trooper's air, seemed almost to be in a state of collapse. When the guard came to his cell he drew himself up and endeavored to collect all his energy; and when the door was opened and he was called he appeared quite like himself. When he saw the prison wagon which had brought him to Mazas and now awaited to take him to the Palais de Justice he instinctively recoiled; then, recovering himself, he entered the narrow vehicle.
The idea, the sensation that he was so near all this life—yet so far—that he was going through these streets, filled with carriages, with men and women who were free, gave him a desperate, a nervous sense of irritation.
The air which they breathed, he breathed and felt fan his brow—but through a grating. They arrived at the Palais and Jacques Dantin recognized the staircases which he had previously mounted, that led to the Examining Magistrate's room. He entered the narrow room where M. Ginory awaited him. Dantin saluted the Magistrate with a gesture which, though courteous, seemed to have a little bravado in it; as a salutation with a sword beforea duel. Then he glanced around, astonished to see, between two guards, a man whom he did not recognize.
M. Ginory studied them. If he knew this Pradès, who also curiously returned his look, Jacques Dantin was a great comedian, because no indication, not the slightest involuntary shudder, not the faintest trace of an expression of having seen him before, crossed his face. Even M. Ginory's keen eyes could detect nothing. He had asked that Bernardet be present at the meeting, and the little man's face, become serious, almost severe, was turned, with eager interrogation in its expression, toward Dantin. Bernardet also was unable to detect the faintest emotion which could be construed into an acknowledgment of ever having seen this young man before. Generally prisoners would, unconsciously, permit a gesture, a glance, a something, to escape them when they were brusquely confronted, unexpectedly, with some accomplice. This time not a muscle of Dantin's face moved, not an eyelash quivered.
M. Ginory motioned Jacques Dantin to a seat directly in front of him, where the light would fall full upon his face. Pointing out Pradès, he asked:
"Do you recognize this man?"
Dantin, after a second or two, replied:
"No; I have never seen him."
"Never?"
"I believe not; he is unknown to me!"
"And you, Pradès, have you ever seen Jacques Dantin?"
"Never," said Pradès, in his turn. His voice seemed hoarse, compared with the brief, clear response made by Dantin.
"He is, however, the original of the portrait which you sold to Mme. Colard."
"The portrait?"
"Look sharply at Dantin. Look at him well," repeated M. Ginory. "You must recognize that he is the original of the portrait in question."
"Yes;" Pradès replied. His eyes were fixed upon the prisoner.
"Ah!" the Magistrate joyously exclaimed, asking: "And how, tell me, did you so quickly recognize the original of the portrait which you saw only an instant in my room?"
"I do not know," stammered Pradès, not comprehending the gravity of a question put in an insinuating, almost amiable tone.
"Oh, well!" continued M. Ginory, still in a conciliating tone, "I am going to explain to you. It is certain that you recognize these features, because you had a long time in which to contemplate them; because you had it a long time in your hands when you were trying to pull off the frame."
"The frame? What frame?" asked the young man stupefied, not taking his eyes from the Magistrate's face, which seemed to him endowed with some occult power. M. Ginory went on:
"The frame which you had trouble in removing, since the scratches show in the wood. And what if, after taking the portrait to Mme. Colard's shop, we should find the frame in question at another place, at some other shop—that would not be very difficult," and M. Ginory smiled at Bernardet. "What if we could add another new deposition to that of Mme. Colard's? Yes; what if to that clear, decisive deposition we could add another—what would you have to say?"
Silence! Pradès turned his head around, his eyes wandered about, as if searching to find an outlet or a support; gasping like a man who has been injured.
Jacques Dantin looked at him at the same moment when the Magistrate, with a glance keener, more piercing than ever, seemed to search his very soul. The young man was now pallid and unmanned.
At length Pradès pronounced some words. What did he want of him? What frame was he talking of? And who was this other dealer of whom the Magistrate spoke and whom he had called a second time? Where was this witness with "the new deposition?"
"One is enough!" he said, casting a ferocious look at Mme. Colard, who, on a sign from M. Ginory, had entered, pale and full of fear.
He added in a menacing tone:
"One is even too much!"
The fingers of his right hand contracted, as if around a knife handle. At this moment Bernardet, who was studying each gesture which the man made, was convinced that the murderer of Rovère was there. He saw that hand armed with the knife, the one which had been found in his pocket, striking his victim, gashing the ex-Consul's throat.
But then, "Dantin?" An accomplice, without doubt. The head, of which the adventurer was the arm. Because, in the dead man's eye, Dantin's image appeared, reflected as clear proof, like an accusation, showing the person who was last seen in Rovère's supreme agony. Jacques Dantin was there—the eye spoke.
Mme. Colard's testimony no longer permitted M. Ginory to doubt. This Charles Pradès was certainly the man who sold the portrait.
Nothing could be proved except that the two men had never met. No sign of emotion showed that Dantin had ever seen the young man before. The latter alone betrayed himself when he was going to Mazas with the original of the portrait painted by Baudry.
But, however, as the Magistrate underlined it with precision, the fact alone of recognizing Dantin constituted against Pradès a new charge. Added to the testimony, to the formal affirmation of the shopkeeper, this charge became grave.
Coldly, M. Ginory said to his registrar:
"An order!"
Then, when Favarel had taken a paper engraved at the top, which Pradès tried to decipher, the Magistrate began to question him. And as M. Ginory spoke slowly, Favarel filled in the blank places which made a free man, a prisoner.
"You are called?" demanded M. Ginory.
"Pradès."
"Your first name?"
"Henri."
"You said Charles to the Commissary of Police."
"Henri-Charles—Charles—Henri."
The Magistrate did not even make a sign to Favarel, seated before the table, and who wrote very quickly without M. Ginory dictating to him.
"Your profession?" continued the Magistrate.
"Commission merchant."
"Your age?"
"Twenty-eight."
"Your residence?"
"Sydney, Australia."
And, upon this official paper, the replies were filled in, one by one, in the blank places:
Court of the First Instance of the Department Of the Seine:
Warrant of Commitment against Pradès.
Note.—Write exactly the names, Christian names, professions, age, residence and nature of charge.
DescriptionHeight metrecentimetres
ForeheadNose
EyesMouth
ChinEyebrows
Hair
General Appearance
We, Edmé-Armand-Georges Ginory, Examining Magistrate of the Court of the First Instance of the Department of the Seine, command and enjoin all officers and guards of the Public Force to conduct to the Prison of Detention, called the Mazas, in conformity to the Law, Pradès (Charles Henri), aged 28 years, Commission Merchant from Sydney. Accused of complicity in the murder of Louis-Pièrre Rovère. We direct the Director of said house of detention to receive and hold him till further orders. We command every man in the Public to lend assistance in order to execute the present order, in case such necessity arises, to which we attach our name and seal.
Made at the Palais de Justice, in Paris, the 12th of February, 1896.
And below, the seal was attached to the order by the registrar. M. Ginory signed it, saying to Favarel:
"The description must be left blank. They will fill it out after the measurements are taken."
Then, Pradès, stupefied till now, not seeming torealize half that was passing around him, gave a sudden, violent start. A cry burst from him.
"Arrested! Have you arrested me?"
M. Ginory leaned over the table. He was calm and held his pen with which he had signed the order, suspended in the air. The young man rushed forward wild with anger, and if the guards had not held him back, he would have seized M. Ginory's fat neck with both hands. The guards held Pradès back, while the Examining Magistrate, carelessly pricking the table with his pen, gently said, with a smile:
"All the same, more than one malefactor has betrayed himself in a fit of anger. I have often thought that it would take very little to get myself assassinated, when I had before me an accused person whom I felt was guilty and who would not confess. Take away the man!"
While they were pushing Pradès toward the corridor he shouted: "Canailles." M. Ginory ordered that Dantin should be left alone with him. "Alone," he said to Bernardet, whose look was a little uneasy. The registrar half rose from his chair, picking up his papers and pushing them into the pockets of his much worn paper case.
"No; you may remain, Favarel."
"Well," said the Magistrate in a familiar tone, when he found himself face to face with Jacques Dantin. "Have you reflected?"
Jacques Dantin, his lips pressed closely together, did not reply.
"It is a counsellor—a counsellor of an especial kind—the cell. He who invented it"——
"Yes;" Dantin brusquely interrupted. "The brain suffers between those walls. I have not slept since I went there. Not slept at all. Insomnia is killing me. It seems as if I should go crazy!"
"Then?" asked M. Ginory.
"Then"——
Jacques Dantin looked fiercely at the registrar, who sat waiting, his pen over his ear, his elbows on the table, his chin on his hands.
"Then, oh, well! Then, here it is, I wish to tell you all—all. But to you—to you"——
"To me alone?"
"Yes," said Dantin, with the same fierce expression.
"My dear Favarel," the Magistrate began.
The registrar had already risen. He slowly bowed and went out.
"Now," said the Magistrate to Jacques Dantin, "you can speak."
The man still hesitated.
"Monsieur," he asked, "will any word said here be repeated, ought it or must it be repeated in a courtroom, at the Assizes, I know not where—anywhere before the public?"
"That depends," said M. Ginory. "But whatyou know you owe to justice, whether it be a revelation, an accusation or a confession, I ask it of you."
Still Dantin hesitated. Then the Magistrate spoke these words: "I demand it!"
With a violent effort the prisoner began. "So be it! But it is to a man of honor, rather than to a Magistrate, to whom I address these words. If I have hesitated to speak, if I have allowed myself to be suspected and to be accused, it is because it seemed to me impossible, absolutely impossible, that this same truth should not be revealed—I do not know in what way—that it would become known to you without compelling me to disclose a secret which was not mine."
"To an Examining Magistrate one may tell everything," said M. Ginory. "We have listened to confessions in our offices which are as inviolable as those of the confessional made to a priest."
And now, after having accused Dantin of lying, believing that he was acting a comedy, after smiling disdainfully at that common invention—a vow which one could not break—the perception of a possibility entered the Magistrate's mind that this man might be sincere. Hitherto he had closed his heart against sympathy for this man; they had met in the mutual hostility.
The manner in which Jacques Dantin approached the question, the resolution with which he spoke,no longer resembled the obstinate attitude which he had before assumed in this same room.
Reflection, the prison—the cell, without doubt—a frightful and stifling cell—had done its work. The man who had been excited to the point of not speaking now wished to tell all.
"Yes," he said, "since nothing has happened to convince you that I am not lying."
"I am listening to you," said the Magistrate.
Then, in a long, close conference, Jacques Dantin told M. Ginory his story. He related how, from early youth, he and Rovère had been close friends; of the warm affection which had always existed between them; of the shams and deceptions of which he had been guilty; of the bitterness of his ruined life; of an existence which ought to have been beautiful, and which, so useless, the life of aviveur, had almost made him—why?—how?—through need of money and a lack of moral sense—almost descend to crime.
This Rovère, whom he was accused of killing, he loved, and, to tell the truth, in that strange and troublous existence which he had lived, Rovère had been the only true friend whom he had known. Rovère, a sort of pessimistic philosopher, a recluse, lycanthropic, after a life spent in feasting, having surfeited himself with pleasure, recognized also in his last years that disinterested affection is rare inthis world, and his savage misanthropy softened before Jacques Dantin's warm friendship.
"I continued to search for, in what is called pleasure and what as one's hair whitens becomes vice; in play; in the uproar of Paris, forgetfulness of life, of the dull life of a man growing old, alone, without home or family, an old, stupid fellow, whom the young people look at with hate and say to each other: 'Why is he still here?' Rovère, more and more, felt the need of withdrawing into solitude, thinking over his adventurous life, as bad and as ruined as mine, and he wished to see no one. A wolf, a wild boar in his lair! Can you understand this friendship between two old fellows, one of whom tried in every way to direct his thoughts from himself, and the other, waiting death in a corner of his fireside, solitary, unsociable?"
"Perfectly! Go on!"
And the magistrate, with eyes riveted upon Jacques Dantin, saw this man, excited, making light of this recital of the past; evoking remembrances of forgotten events, of this lost affection; lost, as all his life was.
"This is not a conference; is it not so? You no longer believe that it is a comedy? I loved Rovère. Life had often separated us. He searched for fortune at the other end of the world. I made a mess of mine and ate it in Paris. But we always kept up our relations, and when he returned toFrance we were happy in again seeing each other. The grayer turned the hair, the more tender the heart became. I had always found him morose—from his twentieth year he always dragged after him a sinister companion—ennui. He had chosen a Consular career, to live far away, and in a fashion not at all like ours. I have often laughingly said to him that he probably had met with unrequited love; that he had experienced some unhappy passion. He said, no! I feigned to believe it. One is not sombre and melancholy like that without some secret grief. After all, there are others who do not feel any gayer with a smile on the lips. Sadness is no sign. Neither is gayety!"
His face took on a weary, melancholy expression, which at first astonished the Magistrate; then he experienced a feeling of pity; he listened, silent and grave.
"I will pass over all the details of our life, shall I not? My monologue would be too long. The years of youth passed with a rapidity truly astonishing; we come to the time when we found ourselves—he weary of life, established in his chosen apartments in the Boulevard de Clichy, with his paintings and books; sitting in front of his fire and awaiting death—I continuing to spur myself on like a foundered horse. Rovère moralized to me; I jeered at his sermons, and I went to sit by his fireside and talk over the past. One ofhis joys had been this portrait of me, painted by Paul Baudry. He had hung it up in his salon, at the corner of the chimney piece, at the left, and he often said to me:
"'Dost thou know that when thou art not here I talk to it?'
"I was not there very often. Parisian life draws us by its thousand attractions. The days which seem interminable when one is twenty rush by as if on wings when one is fifty. One has not even time to stop to see the friends one loves. At the last moment, if one is right, one ought to say, 'How I have cast to the winds everything precious which life has given me. How foolish I have been—how stupid.' Pay no attention to my philosophisms—the cell! Mazas forces one to think!
"One day—it was one morning—on returning from the club where I had passed the night stupidly losing sums which would have given joy to hundreds of families, I found on my desk a message from Rovère. If one would look through my papers one would find it there—I kept it. Rovère begged me to come to him immediately. I shivered—a sharp presentiment of death struck me. The writing was trembling, unlike his own. I struck my forehead in anger. This message had been waiting for me since the night before, while I was spending the hours in gambling. If, when I hurried toward the Boulevard de Clichy, I hadfound Rovère dead on my arrival, I could not, believe me, have experienced greater despair. His assassination seemed to me atrocious; but I was at least able to assure him that his friendship was returned. I hastily read the telegram, threw myself into a fiacre, and hastened to his apartments. The woman who acted as housekeeper for him, Mme. Moniche, the portress, raising her arms as she opened the door for me, said:
"'Ah! Monsieur, but Monsieur has waited for you. He has repeated your name all night. He nearly died, but he is better now.'
"Rovère, sitting the night before by his fire, had been stricken by lateral paralysis, and as soon as he could hold a pen, in spite of the orders of the physician who had been quickly called, had written and sent the message to me some hours before.
"As soon as he saw me he—the strong man, the mad misanthrope, silent and sombre—held me in his arms and burst into tears. His embrace was that of a man who concentrates in one being all that remains of hope.
"'Thou! thou art here!' he said in a low tone. 'If thou knewest!'
"I was moved to the depths of my heart. That manly face, usually so energetic, wore an expression of terror which was in some way almost childish, a timorous fright. The tears rose in his eyes.
"'Oh! how I have waited for thee! how I have longed for thee!'
"He repeated this phrase with anxious obstinacy. Then he seemed to be suffocating. Emotion! The sight of me recalled to him the long agony of that night when he thought that he was about to die without parting with me for the last time.
"'For what I have to tell thee'——
"He shook his head.