“Not so fast,” he said: “we are not done yet. What were the conditions which you and Chevassat agreed upon?”
“Oh! very simple, sir. I, for my part, said yes to everything he proposed. He magnetized me, I tell you, that man! We agreed, therefore, that he would pay me four thousand francs in advance, and that, after the accident, he would give me six thousand certain, and a portion of the sum which he would secure.”
“Thus you undertook, for ten thousand francs, to murder a man?”
“I thought”—
“That sum is very far from those fabulous amounts by which you said you had been blinded and carried away.”
“Pardon me! There was that share in the great fortune.”
“Ah! You knew very well that Chevassat would never have paid you anything.”
Crochard’s hands twitched nervously. He cried out,—
“Chevassat cheat me! cochonnere! I would have—but no; he knows me; he would never have dared”—
The magistrate had caught the prisoner’s eye, and, fixing him sternly, he said good-naturedly,—