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Updated: June 16, 2025
Well, then, the man who hired me to 'do the lieutenant's business' is a certain Justin Chevassat." The most intense disappointment seized both Daniel and the surgeon. This was not the name they had been looking for with such deep anxiety. "Don't you deceive me, Crochard?" asked the lawyer, who alone had been able to conceal all he felt. "You may take my head if I lie!" Did he tell the truth?
I was just considering whether I ought to report him, when he fell at my feet, and implored me to keep it secret; for he had been very unfortunate in life, and if I spoke he would be ruined. "Thinking that he had been simply awkward, I allowed myself to be moved, and swore to Crochard that the matter should remain between us.
The spectator of this scene had long practice in reading faces; he fancied he could discern that the mother's grief was as false as the daughter's was genuine; he turned away, and presently came back. When he next peeped through the hole in the curtain, Madame Crochard was in bed.
When the priest had politely faced the honeyed and bigoted broadside of words fired off from the widow's three friends, he went into the sickroom to sit by Madame Crochard. Decency, and some sense of reserve, compelled the three women and old Francoise to remain in the sitting-room, and to make such grimaces of grief as are possible in perfection only to such wrinkled faces.
Then he added, seeing how disappointed Crochard looked, "You had better try and recollect all you can. Have you forgotten or concealed nothing that might assist us in carrying out this examination?" "No; I think I have told you every thing."
He had too much experience of legal forms not to know that he had given way to absurd illusions, and that his position was far more dangerous than he had imagined. But what was their purpose? what had they found out? and what did they know positively? The effort he made to guess all this gave to his face an atrocious expression. "Did you hear that, Crochard?" asked the lawyer.
"Thus the first attempt at murder is duly and fully proven. As for the second, the one made on the river, we are not quite so far advanced. Still I have hopes. I have found out, for instance, that Crochard is a first-rate swimmer.
"Then how on earth did you learn" "The truth? Oh, very simply. I inquired at Saigon; and I succeeded in finding a sergeant in the Second Regiment of Marines, who was in the First Regiment at the same time with Crochard. He gave me all these details. And there is no mistake about the identity; for, as soon as I said 'Crochard' the sergeant exclaimed, 'Oh, yes! Crochard, surnamed Bagnolet."
Instead of which, Crochard put Pigot's papers in his pocket, set his bag outside the stateroom door, and then came out calmly to meet his dear friends of the press; and I stood there talking to him like a little schoolboy no wonder he thinks I'm a fool!" "But nobody would have suspected!" I gasped. "Why, that man is- is...." "A genius," said Godfrey. "An absolute and unquestioned genius.
The magistrate, however, though no doubt thoroughly disgusted with this absurd comedy, did not move a muscle of his face, nor make a gesture, anxious, as he was, not to break the thread of this important deposition. "Ah, sir!" exclaimed Crochard, his hand upon his heart, "when I heard Chevassat talk that way, my heart turned within me, and I said, 'Unfortunate man, what do you mean?
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