"I swear to you I will get at the truth," was Fandor's parting promise. The cab had disappeared, but our journalist stood motionless, absorbed in his reflections. At last, uttering his thoughts aloud, he said:
"If the Baroness de Vibray has written that she has killed herself, then she has killed herself, and Dollon is innocent. It's true the letter may be fictitious ... therefore we must put it aside—we have no guarantee as to its genuineness.... Here is the problem: Jacques Dollon is dead, and yet has left the Dépôt! Yes, but how?"
Jérôme Fandor went off in the direction of the offices of La Capitale so absorbed in thought that he jostled the passers-by, without noticing the angry glances bestowed on him:
"Jacques Dollon, dead, has left the Dépôt!" He repeated this improbable statement, so absurd, of necessity incorrect; repeated it to the point of satiety:
"Jacques Dollon is dead, and he has got away from the Dépôt!"
Then, in an illuminating flash, he perceived the solution of this apparently insoluble problem:
"A mystery such as this is incomprehensible, inexplicable, impossible, except in connection with one man! There is only one individual in the world capable of making a dead man seem to be alive after his death—and this individual is—Fantômas!"
To formulate this conclusion was to give himself a thrilling shock.... Since the disappearance of Juve, he had never had occasion to suspect the presence, the intervention of Fantômas in connection with any of the crimes he had investigated as reporter and student of human nature.
Fantômas! The sound of that name evoked the worst horrors! Fantômas! This bandit, this criminal who has not shrunk from any cruelty, any horror—Fantômas is crime personified!
Fantômas! He sticks at nothing!