Bunerat. By no means.
Mouzon. It was with the greatest delicacy that I warned our colleague Delorme—he was good enough to consult me and show me day by day the information which he had elicited—I warned him that he was on a false scent. He would listen to nothing; he persisted in searching for his tramp. Well, let him search! There are fifty thousand tramps in France. After all, I am probably wrong. Yet I should be surprised, for in the big towns in which I have served as magistrate, and in which I found myself confronted, not merely now and again, but every day, so to speak, with difficulties of this sort, I was able to acquire a certain practice in criminal cases and a certain degree of perspicacity.
Vagret. Obviously. As for Delorme, it is the first time he has had to deal with such a big crime.
Mouzon. In the case of that pretty woman from Toulouse, at Bordeaux, a case which made a good deal of stir at the time, it was I who forced the accused to make the confession that led her to the guillotine.
Bunerat [admiringly] Was it really?
Vagret. My dear friend, I ask you most seriously—and if I am insistent, it is because I have reasons for being so—between ourselves, I beg you to tell us on what you base your opinion.
Mouzon. Well, I don't want to hide my light under a bushel—I'll tell you.
Bunerat. We are listening.
Mouzon. Recall the facts. In a house isolated as are most of our Basque houses they find, one morning, an old man of eighty-seven murdered in his bed. Servants who slept in the adjacent building had heard nothing. The dogs did not bark. There was robbery, it is true, but the criminal did not confine himself to stealing hard cash; he stole family papers as well. Remember that point. And I will call your attention to another detail. It had rained on the previous evening. In the garden footprints were discovered which were immediately attributed to the murderer, who was so badly shod that the big toe of his right foot protruded from his boot. Monsieur Delorme proceeds along the trail; he obtains a piece of evidence that encourages him, and he declares that the murderer is a vagrant. I say this is a mistake. The murderer is not a vagrant. Now the house in which the crime was committed is an isolated house, and we know that within a radius of six to ten miles there was no tramp begging before the crime. So this tramp, if there was one, would have eaten and drunk on the scene of the crime, either before or after striking the blow. Now no traces have been discovered which permit us to suppose that he did anything of the kind. So—here is a man who arrives in a state of exhaustion. He begs; he is refused. He then hides himself, and, when it is night, he robs and assassinates. There is wine and bread and other food at hand; but he goes his way without touching them. Is this probable? No. Don't tell me that he was disturbed and so ran off; it is not true; their own witness declares that he saw him in the morning, a few yards from the house, whereas the crime was committed before midnight. If Monsieur Delorme, in addition to his distinguished qualities, had a little experience of cases of this kind, he would realize that empty bottles, dirty glasses, and scraps of food left on the table constitute, so to speak, the sign manual which the criminal vagrant leaves behind him on the scene of his crime.
Bunerat. True; I was familiar with that detail.