It was the tall fellow who, the day before, had forced his way through the crowd in the Yard by making an outcry about a wounded man. It was Velmot, a leaner Velmot, without beard or glasses, Velmot, the coxcomb, the object of Bérangère's affections.
"I'll make him, the brute! Think of it. I've got him here, at my mercy: is it likely that I shouldn't be able to make him spew up his secret? No, no, we must finish it and by nightfall. You're still decided?"
He received two growls in reply. He sneered:
"He's not half badly trussed up, eh? All right. I'll do without you. Only just lend me a hand to begin with."
He stepped into a boat fastened to a ring on the bank. One of the men pushed it with a boat-hook between two stakes planted in the mud and standing out well above the reeds. Velmot knotted one end of a thick rope to the top of each stake and in the middle fastened an iron hook, which thus hung four or five feet above the water.
"That's it," he said, on returning. "I shan't want you any more. Take the other boat and go and wait for me in the garage. I'll join you there in three or four hours, when Massignac has blabbed his little story and after I've had a little plain speaking with our new prisoner. And then we'll be off."
He walked away with his two assistants. When I saw him again, twenty minutes later, he had a newspaper in his hand. He laid it on a little table which stood just outside my window. Then he sat down and lit a cigar. He turned his back to me, hiding the table from my view. But at one moment he moved and I caught sight of his paper, the Journal du Soir, which was folded across the page and which bore a heading in capitals running right across the width of the sheet, with this sensational title:
"THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MEUDON
APPARITIONS REVEALED"
I was shaken to the very depths of my being. So the young student had not lied! Benjamin Prévotelle had discovered the truth and had managed, in the space of a few hours, to set it forth in the report of which he had spoken and to make it public.
Glued to the shutter, how I strove to read the opening lines of the article! These were the only lines that met my eyes, because of the manner in which the paper was folded. And how great was my excitement at each word that I made out!