His three accomplices administered anesthetics to both, and placed the brain of Klotz in my uncle’s skull.
As for the brain of Lerne, they no doubt contented themselves with placing it as best they might in the skull of Klotz, who was now only a dead body, and they buried it all in haste with the other débris.
So there is Otto Klotz behind the mask, clothed in the appearance he desired, dressed like Lerne, master of Fonval, of Emma and the laboratory—a sort of monk of St. Bernard sheltered in the shell of the being whom he killed.
Emma saw him come out of the laboratory. He entered the château, pale and trembling, upset the usual habits and customs, made the criss-cross roads of the labyrinth, and then, sure of impunity, began his terrible experiments.
Fortunately the body-snatcher had died too soon, without reaping the reward of a robbery of which he was now the victim, since the heart-disease which had just carried off the spirit of Klotz, belonged really to the body of Lerne.
In this manner is the burglar in a house punished when the roof falls in upon him.
I now understand why that mask had resumed the real expression of my uncle. The soul of the German no longer inhabited it, to give it Klotz’s expression.
Klotz the murderer of Lerne, and not Lerne the assassin of Klotz! I could not get over it.
That is a confidence which the double person had forgotten to make to me, and vexed at having been his dupe so long, I said to myself, that, had I been living alone with him, I should probably have discovered his imposture, but that the society of people as easily deceived as Emma was, or accomplices like the assistants, whether duped themselves or trying to dupe me, had dragged me into this delusion.
Ah! Aunt Lidivine, thought I, you were right to smile with your lips of chalk. Your Frédéric fell into a villainous trap five years ago, and the mind which has just quitted that form, is not his. Nothing alien any longer remains in it, except a deserted brain—a carnal globe as uninteresting as the liver. So it is your husband whom we are watching; it is the other who has just died, and paid his debt.