Prasville was utterly bewildered. What was his strange visitor driving at? What did all this story mean? Pale with excitement, he said:
“Explain yourself.”
“But it’s all explained, it seems to me. And it fits in so well with things as they were, fits in with all the conjectures which I had been making in spite of myself and which would inevitably have led to my solving the mystery, if that damned Daubrecq had not so cleverly sent me astray! Yes, think, follow the trend of my suppositions: ‘As the list is not to be discovered away from Daubrecq,’ I said to myself, ‘it cannot exist away from Daubrecq. And, as it is not to be discovered in the clothes he wears, it must be hidden deeper still, in himself, to speak plainly, in his flesh, under his skin....”
“In his eye, perhaps?” suggested Prasville, by way of a joke....
“In his eye? Monsieur le secrétaire;-général, you have said the word.”
“What?”
“I repeat, in his eye. And it is a truth that ought to have occurred to my mind logically, instead of being revealed to me by accident. And I will tell you why. Daubrecq knew that Clarisse had seen a letter from him instructing an English manufacturer to ‘empty the crystal within, so as to leave a void which it was unpossible to suspect.’ Daubrecq was bound, in prudence, to divert any attempt at search. And it was for this reason that he had a crystal stopper made, ‘emptied within,’ after a model supplied by himself. And it is this crystal stopper which you and I have been after for months; and it is this crystal stopper which I dug out of a packet of tobacco. Whereas all I had to do....”
“Was what?” asked Prasville, greatly puzzled.
M. Nicole burst into a fresh fit of laughter:
“Was simply to go for Daubrecq’s eye, that eye ‘emptied within so as to leave a void which it is impossible to suspect,’ the eye which you see before you.”