"Then they must have taken him somewhere else!"
"The keys have never left me!"
"Oh, come now!"
"No, sir. He was there ... now he isn't there! That's all I know!... Hey! You down there!" yelled the warder: "Who knows what has become of the corpse of cell 12?... The corpse we laid out just now?"
One after the other the warders came running. All confirmed what their chief had said: the dead body of Jacques Dollon had been left there, lying on the bed: not a soul had entered the cell: not a soul had touched the corpse!... Yet it was no longer there! Jérôme Fandor, well in the background, followed the scene with an ironical smile. The frantic warders, the growing stupefaction of Monsieur Fuselier, amused him prodigiously. The magistrate was trying to understand the how, why, and wherefore of this incredible disappearance:
"As this man is not here, he cannot have been dead ... he has escaped ... but if he wanted to escape he must have been guilty!... Oh, I cannot make head or tail of it!"
Seizing the head warder by the shoulders, almost roughly, Monsieur Fuselier asked:
"Look here, chief, was this man dead, or was he not?"
Elizabeth Dollon was repeating:
"He lives! He lives!" and laughing wildly.