"Well," he exclaimed, "there can be no harm in putting them on, since they are mine." A further search disclosed, tucked away in a corner of the coffin, his pocketbook. Not only that, but some generous person had stuffed it literally full of bank notes, and in a small pocket he also found a first-class ticket from Glotzbourg to the frontier.
"What on earth does all this mean?" he exclaimed.
A search of his erstwhile bed now brought to light a sheet torn from a railway time-table, upon which a certain train was underscored in red ink. From another corner of the coffin he brought out a false beard and a pair of yellow spectacles! In a twinkling Juve dressed himself and crossing to the door, pushed it open and looked out.
"The deuce!" he cried, "that's a funereal outlook!"
Before him stretched away on all sides ... tombstones! tombstones big and little—some with crosses, others with crowns and flowers.
Juve was in a cemetery, and the strange room in which he found himself was the mortuary chapel. Nothing disturbed the impressive silence of this vast resting place. In the distance a clock struck five, and far off Juve perceived the silhouette of the Glotzbourg Cathedral.
The detective pulled himself together and began to piece out by his well-known habit of induction some solution to this incomprehensible mystery.
"To begin with," he exclaimed, "my being still alive is evidently due to the will of my adversaries. It is possible that the police of Hesse-Weimar may have discovered their mistake, and taken this method of setting me at liberty. Or, it has been given out that I am dead, and they intend to bury this poor fellow in my place....
"No, that's stupid. I was forgetting it is Fantômas who is supposed to be caught, then are they going to give out that Fantômas is dead?... That seems out of the question.... Besides this man didn't die a natural death, he was killed! I can't make head or tail of it."
Juve paced up and down, rejecting one hypothesis after another. Finally, with a shrug of his shoulders, he cried: