“Yes, sir,” he said, “we will take Mme. Essarès away. Her presence, as you say, is unnecessary. Only I must first . . .”
He moved aside to avoid his interlocutor, and, perceiving that the group of magistrates had opened out a little, stepped forward. What he now saw explained Coralie’s fainting-fit and the servant’s agitation. He himself felt his flesh creep at a spectacle which was infinitely more horrible than that of the evening before.
On the floor, near the fireplace, almost at the place where he had undergone his torture, Essarès Bey lay upon his back. He was wearing the same clothes as on the previous day: a brown-velvet smoking-suit with a braided jacket. His head and shoulders had been covered with a napkin. But one of the men standing around, a divisional surgeon no doubt, was holding up the napkin with one hand and pointing to the dead man’s face with the other, while he offered an explanation in a low voice.
And that face . . . but it was hardly the word for the unspeakable mass of flesh, part of which seemed to be charred while the other part formed no more than a bloodstained pulp, mixed with bits of bone and skin, hairs and a broken eye-ball.
“Oh,” Patrice blurted out, “how horrible! He was killed and fell with his head right in the fire. That’s how they found him, I suppose?”
The man who had already spoken to him and who appeared to be the most important figure present came up to him once more:
“May I ask who you are?” he demanded.
“Captain Belval, sir, a friend of Mme. Essarès, one of the wounded officers whose lives she has helped to save . . .”
“That may be, sir,” replied the important figure, “but you can’t stay here. Nobody must stay here, for that matter. Monsieur le commissaire, please order every one to leave the room, except the doctor, and have the door guarded. Let no one enter on any pretext whatever. . . .”
“Sir,” Patrice insisted, “I have some very serious information to communicate.”