He closed the window and sat down again:
“You see, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, the enemy has even ceased to take the most ordinary precautions—he has not time left—he too feels that the hour is urgent. Let us be quick, therefore, and speak, since they do not wish us to speak.”
He laid the document on the table and held it in position, unfolded:
“One observation, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, to begin with. The paper consists almost entirely of dots and figures. And in the first three lines and the fifth—the only ones with which we have to do at present, for the fourth seems to present an entirely different character—not one of those figures is higher than the figure 5. There is, therefore, a great chance that each of these figures represents one of the five vowels, taken in alphabetical order. Let us put down the result.”
He wrote on a separate piece of paper:
e . a . a . . e . . e . a . . a . .
a . . . e . e . . e oi . e . . e .
. ou . . e . o . . . e . . e . o . . e
ai . ui . . e . . eu . e
Then he continued:
“As you see, this does not give us much to go upon. The key is, at the same time, very easy, because the inventor has contented himself with replacing the vowels by figures and the consonants by dots, and very difficult, if not impossible, because he has taken no further trouble to complicate the problem.”
“It is certainly pretty obscure.”
“Let us try to throw some light upon it. The second line is divided into two parts; and the second part appears in such a way that it probably forms one word. If we now seek to replace the intermediary dots by consonants, we arrive at the conclusion, after searching and casting about, that the only consonants which are logically able to support the vowels are also logically able to produce only one word, the word demoiselles.”