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Perenna had but one thought in his head: to reach the next station, which was Chartres, before the two accomplices, and to fly at Sauverand's throat. He saw nothing but that: the savage grip of his two hands that would set Florence Levasseur's lover gasping in his agony. "Her lover! Her lover!" he muttered, gnashing his teeth. "Why, of course, that explains everything!
Fauville to whom no doubt, in the course of the day, imitating Sauverand's handwriting, he had sent a letter one of those letters which are always torn up at once, in which Sauverand entreated the poor woman to grant him an interview at the Ranelagh Mme. Fauville would leave the opera and, before going to Mme. d'Ersinger's party, would spend an hour not far from the house.
Acting, to Don Luis Perenna, during those hours of forced inactivity, consisted solely in perpetually repeating to himself Gaston Sauverand's account of the events. He tried to reconstitute it in all its details, to remember the very least sentences, the apparently most insignificant phrases.
Well, I was saying, the deputy chief had learnt that the woman who used to go to Gaston Sauverand's at Neuilly you know, the house on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace was fair and very good looking, and that her name was Florence. She even used to stay the night sometimes." "You lie! You lie!" hissed Perenna. All his spite was reviving.
I'll answer for it that he has accomplices and not a hundred yards from my house do you understand? From my house." After questioning Mazeroux upon Sauverand's attitude and the other incidents of the arrest, Don Luis went back to the Place du Palais-Bourbon.
A long pause followed, during which he met Florence's eyes, hostile eyes, full of rebellion and disdain. Had she, too, guessed? He dared not speak another word. He waited for Sauverand's explanation. And, while waiting, he gave not a thought to the coming revelations, nor to the tremendous problems of which he was at last about to know the solution, nor to the tragic events at hand.
Don Luis had only to understand, and the truth would appear like the moral which we draw from some obscure fable. Don Luis did not once deviate from his method. If any objection suggested itself to his mind, he at once replied: "Very well. It may be that I am wrong and that Sauverand's story will not enlighten me on any point capable of guiding me. It may be that the truth lies outside it.
Her inexplicable drive in the direction of La Muette and her cousin Sauverand's walk in the neighbourhood of the house: plots! The marks left in the apple by those teeth, by Mme. Fauville's own teeth: a plot and the most infernal of all! "I tell you, everything is plotted beforehand, everything is, so to speak, prepared, measured out, labelled, and numbered.
But am I in a position to get at the truth in any other way? All that I possess as an instrument of research, without attaching undue importance to certain gleams of light which the regular appearance of the mysterious letters has shed upon the case, all that I possess is Gaston Sauverand's story. Must I not make use of it?"
Speaking very slowly, with his eyes fixed on Don Luis's eyes, he said: "Whoever the culprit may be, I know nothing more terrible than this work of hatred." "It is an even more improbable work than you can imagine, Monsieur le Préfet," said Perenna, with growing animation, "and it is a hatred of which you, who do not know Sauverand's confession, cannot yet estimate the violence.
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