Nothing was now to be done except to question some of the neighbors and to take a sketch of the salon. Bernardet said to the Magistrate: "My photograph will give you that!" While some one went out to get a hearse, the Magistrates went away, the police officer placed a guard in front of the house. The crowd was constantly increasing and becoming more and more curious, violently excited and eager to see the spectacle—the murdered man borne from his home.
Bernardet did not allow M. Ginory to go away without asking respectfully if he would be allowed to photograph the dead man's eye. Without giving him a formal answer, M. Ginory simply told him to be present at the autopsy at the Morgue. Evidently if the Magistrate had not been already full of doubt his reply would have been different. Why did that inferior officer have the audacity to give his opinion on the subject of conducting a judicial investigation? M. Ginory would long before this have sent him about his business if he had not become suddenly interested in him. In his quality of Judge he had come to know Bernardet's history and his exploits in the service. No more capable man, in his line, could be found. He was perfectly and utterly devoted to his profession. Some strange tales were told of his methods. It was he who once passed an entire night on a bench, pretending intoxication, in order to gain sufficient information to enable him to arrest a murderer in the morning in a wretched hovel at La Vilette—a murderer armed to the teeth. It was Bernardet who, without arms—as all those agents—caught the famous bandit, the noted Taureau de la Glacière, a foreign Hercules, who had strangled his mistress. Bernardet arrested him by holding to his temple the cold neck of a bottle and saying, "Hands up or I fire!" Now what the bandit took for the cold muzzle of a pistol was a vial containing some medicine which Bernardet had purchased of a pharmacist for his liver.
Deeds of valor against thieves, malefactors and insurrectionists abounded in Bernardet's life; and M. Ginory had just discovered in this man, whom he believed simply endowed with the activity and keenness of a hunting dog, an intelligence singularly watchful, deep and complicated. Bernardet, who had nothing more to do until the body should be taken to the Morgue, left the house directly after the Magistrates.
"Where are you going?" asked Paul Rodier, the reporter.
"Home. A few steps from here."
"May I go along with you?" asked the journalist.
"To find an occasion to make me speak? But I know nothing! I suspect nothing; I shall say nothing!"
"Do you believe that it is the work of a thief, or revenge?"
"I am certain that it was no thief. Nothing in the apartment was touched. As for the rest, who knows?"
"M. Bernardet," laughingly said the reporter, as he walked along by the officer's side, "you do not wish to speak."