“I shall know very well,” he murmured to himself at intervals. “I shall know how to show her I love her truly. By the ardour of my words I shall gain her confidence, the confidence she must grant me, which I must have, that she may feel I speak the truth, that I am not what Fantômas has told her I was.”
Arrived at 142 bis Rue des Couronnes, Fandor found the house a crowded nest of working people’s flats. Along a narrow, fetid passage, its damp walls stained and scarred over with inscriptions indicating the names of the tenants and the different floors they occupied, Fandor penetrated to the concierge’s lodge. He tried to push open the door, but it would not yield.
“So,” thought the young man, “the woman is not within.” He called: “Anyone there?” but his voice was drowned by a deafening noise proceeding from a tiny courtyard near by.
Turning his steps in that direction, he discovered a woman busy with two sticks beating clouds of dust out of an unstitched mattress.
“The concierge?” asked the visitor.
The woman broke off her work to demand in a grumbling voice:
“What do you want with her, eh?”
“To inquire for a tenant’s rooms.”
“What tenant?”
“Mlle. Dollon.”