“I should have gone to his house, where I breakfasted with him; and, if he had left, the concierge would have told me where he lived now.”
“Then you really think you saw him at his own rooms? Consider. If you left him only for a couple of hours, between the time when you first met him and the visit you paid him afterwards, he might very well have improvised a new domicile for himself.”
“Ah! I did not lie, sir. When dinner was over, I had lost my consciousness, and I did not get wide awake again till noon on the next day. Chevassat had the whole night and next morning.”
Then, as a suspicion suddenly flashed through Crochard’s mind, he exclaimed,—
“Ah, the brigand! Why did he urge me never to write to him otherwise than ‘to be called for’?”
The magistrate had turned to his clerk.
“Go down,” he said, “and see if any of the merchants in town have a Paris Directory.”
The clerk went off like an arrow, and appeared promptly back again with the volume in question. The magistrate hastened to look up the address given by the prisoner, and found it entered thus: “Langlois, sumptuous apartments for families and single persons. Superior attendance.”
“I was almost sure of it,” he said to himself.
Then handing Daniel the paper on which the words “University” and “Street” could be deciphered, he asked,—