"Oh!" said Bernardet, noticing the slight difference in the tone of his answer. "We wish nothing. We wish only the truth."
"I have told it."
Charles Pradès furnished some further information in regard to himself. He was staying at a hotel in the Rue de Paradis-Poissonsière, a small hotel used by commercial travelers and merchants of the second class. He had been in Paris only a month.
Where was he from? He said that he came from Sydney, where he was connected with a commercial house. Or rather he had given up the situation to come to Paris to seek his fortune. But while speaking of Sydney he had in his rather rambling answers let fall the name of Buenos Ayres, and Bernardet remembered that Buenos Ayres was the place where M. Rovère had been French Consul. The officer paid no attention to this at the time. For what good? Pradès's real examination would be conducted by M. Ginory. He, Bernardet, was not an examining magistrate. He was the ferret who hunted out criminals.
This Pradès was stupefied, then furious, when, the examination over, he learned that he was not to be immediately set at liberty.
What! An absurd quarrel, a collision without a wound, in a street in Paris, was sufficient to hold a man and make him pass the night in the station house, with all the vagabonds of both sexes collected there!
"You may bemoan your fate to yourself to-morrow morning!" said Bernardet.
In the meantime they searched this man, who, very pale, making visibly powerful efforts to control himself, biting his lips and his black beard, while they examined his pocketbook, while they looked at a Spanish knife with a short blade, which he had (Bernardet had divined it at the time of his arrest) in his right pocket.
The pocketbook revealed nothing. It contained some receipted weekly bills of the hotel in the Rue de Paradis, some envelopes without letters, without stamps and bearing the name, "Charles Pradès, Merchant," two bank bills of 100 francs—nothing more.
Bernardet very simply asked Pradès how it was that he had upon his person addressed letters which he evidently had not received, as they were not stamped. He replied: