The crowd buzzed about the lodge like a swarm of flies. M. Rovère's body had been brought back from the Morgue. The obsequies would naturally attract an enormous crowd; all the more, as the mystery was still as deep as ever. Among his papers had been found a receipt for a tomb in the cemetery at Montmartre, bought by him about a year before. In another paper, not dated, were found directions as to how his funeral was to be conducted. M. Rovère, after having passed a wandering life, wished to rest in his native country. But no other indications of his wishes, nothing about his relatives, had been found. It seemed as if he was a man without a family, without any place in society, or any claim on any one to bury him. And this distressing isolation added to the morbid curiosity which was attached to the house, now all draped in black, with the letter "R" standing out in white against its silver escutcheon.
Who would be chief mourner? M. Rovère had appointed no one. He had asked in that paper that a short notice should be inserted in the paper giving the hour and date of the services, and giving him the simple title ex-Consul. "I hope," went on the writer, "to be taken to the cemetery quietly and followed by intimate friends, if any remain."
Intimate friends were scarce in that crowd, without doubt, but the dead man's wish could hardly be carried out. Those obsequies which he had wished to be quiet became a sort of fête, funereal and noisy; where the thousands of people crowding the Boulevard crushed each other in their desire to see, and pressed almost upon the draped funeral car which the neighbors had covered with flowers.
Everything is a spectacle for Parisians. The guardians of the peace strove to keep back the crowds; some gamins climbed into the branches of the trees. The bier had been placed at the foot of the staircase in the narrow corridor opening upon the street. Mme. Moniche had placed upon a table in the lodge some loose leaves, where Rovère's unknown friends could write their names.
Bernardet, alert, with his eyes wide open, studying the faces, searching the eyes, mingled with the crowd, looked at the file of people, scrutinized, one by one, the signatures; Bernardet, in mourning, wearing black gloves, seemed more like an undertaker's assistant than a police spy. Once he found himself directly in front of the open door of the lodge and the table where the leaves lay covered with signatures; when in the half light of the corridor draped with black, where the bier lay, he saw a man of about fifty, pale and very sad looking. He had arrived, in his turn in the line, at the table, where he signed his name. Mme. Moniche, clothed in black, with a white handkerchief in her hand, although she was not weeping, found herself side by side with Bernardet; in fact, their elbows touched. When the man reached the table, coming from the semi-darkness of the passage, and stepped into the light which fell full on him from the window, the portress involuntarily exclaimed, "Ah!" She was evidently much excited, and caught the police officer by the hand and said:
"I am afraid!"
She spoke in such a low tone that Bernardet divined rather than heard what she meant in that stifled cry. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. He saw that she was ghastly, and again she spoke in a low tone: "He! he whom I saw with M. Rovère before the open safe!"
Bernardet gave the man one sweeping glance of the eye. He fairly pierced him through with his sharp look. The unknown, half bent over the table whereon lay the papers, showed a wide forehead, slightly bald, and a pointed beard, a little gray, which almost touched the white paper as he wrote his name.
Suddenly the police officer experienced a strange sensation; it seemed to him that this face, the shape of the head, the pointed beard, he had recently seen somewhere, and that this human silhouette recalled to him an image which he had recently studied. The perception of a possibility of a proof gave him a shock. This man who was there made him think suddenly of that phantom discernible in the photographs taken of the retina of the murdered man's eye.
"Who is that man?"