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The rapide for Paris was due, I saw, to leave Lyons Perrache at eight that night. That would suit me well, and I at once decided to go by it. Then, having nothing to do until the time of starting, I once more strolled out into the town. A newsboy was shouting the news, and I bought a paper from him. Almost the first headline upon which my glance rested stirred a recollection in my mind.
Then, having spied behind the night-table a dirty bottle which might hold about two quarts, "Did he say the rue des Canelles?" she inquired of the portress. "Corner of the rue Guisarde," replied Madame Perrache. "Monsieur Legrelu, a tall, fine man with big whiskers and no hair." Then, lowering her voice, she added: "His number-six wine, you know, is Roussillon, and the best, too.
"Madame Perrache, come up and taste his wine. Wouldn't you have thought to hear him talk he was ready to drink a cask of it? Well, a cupful satisfied him." "Your health!" said the portress, touching glasses with the Cardinal, who was careful to have hers filled with the unboiled wine. After a rather long gossip, the two women separated.
"This is my first knowledge of it." "But you probably expected it. When one gives a dying man an immense bowl of hot wine, which has also been narcotized, for the Perrache woman slept all night in a sort of lethargy after drinking a small glass of it, it is evident that the catastrophe has been hastened."
"Your fish, indeed!" cried Toupillier; "all rotten! That last you brought me, more than six weeks ago, it is there in the cupboard; you can take it away with you." "Heavens! how ungrateful sick men are!" whispered the widow Cardinal to Perrache. Nevertheless, to exhibit solicitude, she arranged the pillow under the patient's head, saying: "There! uncle, don't you feel better like that?"
Four days later we descended at the big busy Perrache station at Lyons from the lumbering rapide which had brought us from Paris, and entered the Terminus Hôtel which adjoins the platform.
The first time was when, leaving the hotel to seek the post office and despatch his letter to London, he found himself suddenly face to face with Dupont, who was seated at a café table near the hotel entrance and narrowly scrutinising all who passed in and out; covering this occupation with affected interest in the gossip of his companion, the little rat man of the Gare de Perrache.
"No, monsieur," replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the pauper. Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while we pursue our own inquiries elsewhere.
I do not feel disposed to describe Lyons particularly, although I have become intimately acquainted with every part of it, from Presqu' isle Perrache to Croix Rousse.
On rummaging the bed from which the body was moved, nothing was found, and Madame Cardinal, pressed by Cerizet to explain why she had confidently asserted that her uncle "was lying on one hundred thousand francs in gold," was forced to admit that a talk with Madame Perrache, and her own fervid imagination were the sole grounds of her certainty.
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