“Look at it, Monsieur le Comte, and see for yourself: it’s plaster! Rusty, musty, mildewed plaster, made to look like old stone—but plaster for all that, plaster casts!—That’s all that remains of your perfect masterpiece!—That’s what they’ve done in just a few days!-That’s what the Sieur Charpenais who copied the Rubenses, prepared a year ago.” He seized M. Filleul’s arm in his turn. “What do you think of it, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction? Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it gorgeous? The chapel has been removed! A whole Gothic chapel collected stone by stone! A whole population of statues captured and replaced by these chaps in stucco! One of the most magnificent specimens of an incomparable artistic period confiscated! The chapel, in short, stolen! Isn’t it immense? Ah, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, what a genius the man is!”
“You’re allowing yourself to be carried away, M. Beautrelet.”
“One can’t be carried away too much, monsieur, when one has to do with people like that. Everything above the average deserves our admiration. And this man soars above everything. There is in his flight a wealth of imagination, a force and power, a skill and freedom that send a thrill through me!”
“Pity he’s dead,” said M. Filleul, with a grin. “He’d have ended by stealing the towers of Notre-Dame.”
Isidore shrugged his shoulders:
“Don’t laugh, monsieur. He upsets you, dead though he may be.”
“I don’t say not, I don’t say not, M. Beautrelet, I confess that I feel a certain excitement now that I am about to set eyes on him—unless, indeed, his friends have taken away the body.”
“And always admitting,” observed the Comte de Gesvres, “that it was really he who was wounded by my poor niece.”
“It was he, beyond a doubt, Monsieur le Comte,” declared Beautrelet; “it was he, believe me, who fell in the ruins under the shot fired by Mlle. de Saint-Véran; it was he whom she saw rise and who fell again and dragged himself toward the cloisters to rise again for the last time—this by a miracle which I will explain to you presently—to rise again for the last time and reach this stone shelter—which was to be his tomb.”
And Beautrelet struck the threshold of the chapel with his stick.