As I was yielding to this righteous indignation, a noise arose. Some one was knocking.
Ah! my hell beyond the grave will be to hear that little insignificant tapping. In a flash I felt every nerve in my body. Some one was knocking!
In a bound I was in the rotunda, and my face must have been terrible to see, for instinctively the dread of an adversary made me assume a look of ferocity.
Nobody on the doorstep—nobody in the park—I went in again.
The noise began once more. It was coming from the yet unexplored wing. Losing my head, I dashed towards it without realizing my rashness, or the risk of finding myself face to face with the danger, and so excited, that I banged my head against the door, as I opened it with a violent pull.
Nervous exhaustion had brought me down to this condition of weakness. And I ask myself to-day whether it had not to some extent given me hallucinations and made me fancy things to be more bizarre than they really were.
An intense light flooded the third hall and helped me at once to recover my assurance. On a dresser there was a cage upside down which was knocking about with a rat inside it, as in a prison. When the rat jumped, the cage jumped; hence the noise. At the sight of me, the rodent became quiet. I attached no importance to this little episode.
This place, which was less orderly than the others, looked like an ill-kept hothouse. But towels stained with blood and thrown on the ground, lancets lying anyhow among half empty test-tubes, all this told of recent work and might serve as an excuse for the confusion.
I began my investigation.
The first two witnesses to appear did not give me much information. These were some very humble plants in their china pots. Their names in um or us have gone from my memory, a thing I deplore, for they would give my tale more authoritativeness, and more resonance. But who, at the mention of their ordinary names, could fail to represent to himself a tuft of plantain and a tuft of hare’s-ear?