"Whoever struck the blow did it quickly," thought the police officer. He advanced softly toward the body, casting his eye upon the inert mass and taking in at a glance the smallest objects near it and the most minute details. He bent over and studied it thoroughly.
M. Rovère seemed living in his tragic pose. The pale face, with its pointed and well-trimmed gray beard, expressed in its fierce immobility a sort of menacing anger. This man of about fifty years had evidently died cursing some one in his supreme agony. The frightful wound seemed like a large red cravat, which harmonized strangely with the half-whitened beard, the end of which was wet with blood.
But what struck Bernardet above everything else, arrested his attention, and glued him to the spot, was the look, the extraordinary expression in the eyes. The mouth was open, as if to cry out, the eyes seemed to menace some one, and the lips about to speak.
They were frightful. Those tragic eyes were wide open, as if transfixed by fear or fury.
They seemed fathomless, staring, ready to start from their sockets. The eyebrows above them were black and bristling. They seemed living eyes in that dead face. They told of a final struggle, of some atrocious duel of looks and of words. They appeared, in their ferocious immobility, as when they gazed upon the murderer, eye to eye, face to face.
Bernardet looked at the hands.
They were contracted and seemed, in some obstinate resistance, to have clung to the neck or the clothing of the assassin.
"There ought to be blood under the nails, since he made a struggle," said Bernardet, thinking aloud.
And Paul Rodier, the reporter, hurriedly wrote, "There was blood under the nails."
Bernardet returned again and again to the eyes—those wide-open eyes, frightful, terrible eyes, which, in their fierce depths, retained without doubt the image or phantom of some nightmare of death.