“How was that?”
“He was bored with solitary confinement. He had been promised a pipe of canteen tobacco if he confessed. He did confess. He told them all they wanted. This Sieurin, who has been sentenced thirty-seven times for vagabondage, is incapable of killing a fly. He has never committed robbery. He is a simpleton, an inoffensive creature. At the time of the crime, the gendarmes saw him on Duroc hill making straw fountains and cork boats for the school children.”
M. le président resumed his game.
“Ninety—forty. … During this time, Lecœur was telling all the girls in the Quartier des Carreaux that he had done the deed, and the keepers of disorderly houses were bringing to the police-inspector Madame Houssieu’s earrings, chain, and rings that the butcher-boy had distributed among their inmates. This Lecœur, like so many other murderers, gave himself up. But Roquincourt, in a rage, left Sieurin, or Pied-d’Alouette, in solitary confinement. He is still there. Ninety-nine … and one hundred.”
“Splendid!” said M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin.
“So,” murmured M. Delion, “this woman of eighty-three had still … It is incredible!”
But Dr. Fornerol, agreeing with President Peloux’s opinion, declared that the case was not as unusual as they fancied, and he supplied the physiological explanation, which was listened to with interest. Then he went on to quote different cases of sexual aberrations and wound up in these words:
“If the devil on two sticks, lifting us up in the air, were to raise the roofs of the town before our eyes, we should see appalling sights, and we should be staggered at the discovery among our fellow-citizens of so many maniacs, degenerates, mad men and mad women.”
“Bah!” said M. Worms-Clavelin, the préfet, “one must not look too closely into that. All these people, taken one by one, are perhaps what you say; but together they form a superb mass of constituents and a splendid county-town population for the department.”
Now, on the raised divan which overlooked the billiard-table, Senator Laprat-Teulet sat caressing his long white beard. He had the majesty of a river.