"Well, but," said Monsieur Ginory in a tone which seemed to Bernardet to imply hope, "no idea must be rejected, and I do not see why we should not try the experiment. I have reflected upon it. Where is the unsuitableness?"
"Ah, Monsieur le Juge," cried the agent, "if you permit it who knows but that we may revolutionize medical jurisprudence?"
"Revolutionize, revolutionize!" Would the Examining Magistrate yet find it an idiotic idea?
M. Ginory passed around the building and entered by a small door opening on the Seine. The registrar followed him, and behind him came the police agent. Bernardet wished to wait until the doctors delegated to perform the autopsy should arrive, and the head keeper of the Morgue advised him to possess himself with patience, and while he was waiting to look around and see the latest cadavers which had been brought there.
"We have had, in eight days, a larger number of women than men, which is rare. And these women were nearly all habitués of the public balls and race tracks."
"And how can you tell that?"
"Because they have pretty feet."
Professor Morin arrived with a confrère, a young Pasteurian doctor, with a singular mind, broad and receptive, and who passed among his companions for a man fond of chimeras, a little retiring, however, and giving over to making experiments and to vague dreams. Monsieur Morin saluted M. Ginory and presented to him the young doctor, Erwin by name, and said to the Magistrate that the house students had probably begun the autopsy to gain time.
The body, stripped of its clothing, lay upon the dissecting table, and three young men, in velvet skull caps, with aprons tied about their waists, were standing about the corpse; they had already begun the autopsy. The mortal wound looked redder than ever in the whiteness of the naked body.
Bernardet glided into the room, trying to keep out of sight, listening and looking, and, above everything, not losing sight of M. Ginory's face. A face in which the look was keen, penetrating, sharp as a knife, as he bent over the pale face of the murdered man, regarding it as searchingly as the surgeons' scalpels were searching the wound and the flesh. Among those men in their black clothes, some with bared heads, in order to work better; others with hats on, the stretched-out corpse seemed like a wax figure upon a marble slab. Bernardet thought of those images which he had seen copied from Rembrandt's pictures—the poet with the anatomical pincers and the shambles. The surgeons bent over the body, their hands busy and their scissors cutting the muscles. That wound, which had let out his life, that large wound, like a monstrous and grimacing mouth, they enlarged still more; the head oscillated from side to side, and they were obliged to prop it with some mats. The eyes remained the same, and, in spite of the hours which had passed, seemed as living, as menacing and eloquent as the night before; they were, however, veiled with something vitreous over the pupils, like the amaurosis of death, yet full of that anger, of that fright, or that ferocious malediction which was reproduced in a startling manner in the negatives taken by Bernardet.