Tea things were laid upon the table and a bright fire was burning upon the hearth and it was an indication of the man’s nature, that, burning as he was to be at his notes, he first had tea and fortified the inner man with a meal that the inner man was badly in need of.
The notebooks, large volumes filled with press cuttings, were on a lower shelf. He took a small ledger, looked up the letter L, found the following entry: “Lefarge case, book B, page 115.”
Then he placed book B upon the table, opened it at page 115 and, drawing up a chair, plunged into details.
He just scanned the columns of printed matter over first for names before going through the case in detail. His heart bounded when he came upon the name, “Müller,” and again upon the name Müller, and again and again.
Müller had a lot to do with the business dealt with by all these columns of printed matter.
That business was what is known in the annals of crime as the Lefarge case; and it had occurred eight years previously in Paris, and the details are as follows:
M. Lefarge, it appears, had owned a shop in the Rue de la Paix. He was a jeweller and very wealthy. He was also a widower, and his family consisted of one daughter, Cécile, whom we saw in the first pages of this story, and who, at the time of the Lefarge tragedy, was just sixteen years of age.
It appears that Lefarge had many friends south of the Seine; he was well known in the Latin quarter as a patron of art and a merry companion when the fit took him, and altogether as a good sort.
He did not make these excursions into the Quartier Latin entirely for pleasure; he was a Norman, and had, even when engaged in the business of pleasure, an eye to business.
The manufacturing of artistic jewellery stands amidst the highest of the fine arts and amidst the Bohemians of the Boulevard St-Michel, M. Lefarge had picked up more than one shabby individual with genius at his finger tips and the mutual acquaintanceship had helped to enrich considerably both the jeweller and the genius. Amongst these Bohemian acquaintances of Lefarge there was a man named Müller. Müller was a sculptor.