II.
THE GRESLON AFFAIR.
THE celebrated philosopher was in everything methodically punctual. Among the maxims which he had adopted at the beginning, in imitation of Descartes, was this: “Order enfranchises the mind.”
He arrived, therefore, at the Palais de Justice five minutes before the time appointed. He had to wait a half-hour in the corridor before the judge called him. In this long passage, with its long, bare, white walls, and furnished with a few chairs and tables for the use of the messengers, all voices were lowered, as is usual in all official antechambers.
There were six or seven other persons. The savants companions were an honest bourgeois and his wife, some shopkeepers of the neighborhood who were very much out of their element. The sight of this person, with his smoothly-shaven face, his eyes hidden behind the dark, round glasses of his spectacles, with his long redingote and his inexplicable physiognomy made these people so uneasy that they left the place where they were whispering together:
“He is a detective,” whispered the husband to his wife.
“Do you think so?” asked the woman regarding the enigmatic and immovable figure in terror. “Dieu! but he has a false look!”
While this profoundly comic scene was being acted, without the professional observer of the human heart suspecting for a moment the effect he was producing, nor even noticing that there was any one beside him awaiting audience, the Judge of Instruction was talking with a friend in a small room adjoining his office.
Adorned with the autographs and portraits of some famous criminals, this apartment served M. Valette for toilet-room, smoking-room, and also a place of retreat when he wished to chat out of the inevitable presence of his clerk.
The judge was a man less than forty years of age, with a handsome profile, clothes cut in the latest fashion and with rings on his fingers, in fact, a magistrate of the new school. He held in his hand the paper on which the savant had written his name in a clear, running hand and passed it to his friend, a simple man of leisure, with one of those physiognomies at once nervous and expressionless which are only seen in Paris. Would you try to read their tastes, habits, or character? It is impossible, so manifold and contradictory are the sensations which have passed over the countenance. This viveur was one of those men who are always present at first representations, who visit painters’ studios, who attend sensational trials, and who pride themselves on being au courant with the affairs of the day, “in the swim,” as they say to-day.
After reading the name of Adrien Sixte, he exclaimed: