A horrid spectacle struck him motionless. His lantern made visible a struggling, heaving mass of rats, fighting tooth and claw, enormous rats devouring some hidden thing!
Fandor's stomach rose at the sight.
Oh, horror! Could it be Jacques Dollon's body?
Fandor snatched up a stone and flung it furiously among the unclean beasts. They fled. On the ground he could distinguish a mass, a red, formless mass, saturated with congealed blood:
"Assuredly, if the corpse has disappeared, it is there the assassins must have cut it in pieces, that they might carry it more easily, and those vile creatures are in the thick of feasting on the poor victim's remains!... Pouah!"
Fandor moved on, only to discover another pool of blood almost as large, also besieged by rats:
"Evidently I shall find nothing else," thought Fandor: "the corpse no longer exists!"
He continued his advance, determined to find out what this underground way ended in. His lantern was flickering to a finish when he arrived at the end of the sewer and found, as he had foreseen, that its opening had been cut in the steep bank of the Seine:
"That's a bit of luck! I can get out this way instead of having to climb back the way I came, up to the Palais roof and down again!"
It was still night; darkness reigned save on the far horizon, where a faint, whitish line indicated the early dawn of an April day.