n the discovery of the
corpse; he was standing close by and had heard every syllable. "It
almost looks as if the man had been murdered;" those were the
astonished words of the doctor when he was examining the wound in the
throat. "Murdered? what are you saying, man?" interposed one of the
company. "Yes, murdered!" cried the cobbler triumphantly.--"But it is
said that there was sand sticking to the wound," remarked a young man
shyly.--"O pshaw! sand, sand!" retorted the shoemaker, "What does sand
prove anyway?"--"No, sand proves nothing," all of them admitted. And by
midday the report in all the houses of the quarter ran: Fualdes had
been murdered, he had been butchered. The word gave the inflamed minds
a picture, the whispering tongues a hint.

Now, by a strange chance it happened that on that fateful evening the
night watchman had deposited in the guardroom a cane with an ivory knob
and a gilt ring, which he had found in front of the Bancal dwelling,
separated from lawyer Fualdes' house by the Rue de l'Ambrague, a dark
cross street. Fualdes' housekeeper, an old deaf woman, asserted
positively that the cane was the property of her master; her assertion
seemed incontestable. A long time after, it came to light that the cane
belonged to a traveling tradesman who had spent the night carousing in
the company of some wenches; but at the time, attention was at once
turned to the Bancal house, a dilapidated, gloomy building with musty,
dirty corners. It had formerly been owned by a butcher, and pigs were
still kept in the yard. It was a house of assignation and was visited
nightly by soldiers, smugglers, and questionable-looking girls; now and
then, too, heavily veiled ladies and aristocratic-looking men slipped
in and out. On the ground floor there lived, beside the Bancal couple,
a former soldier, Colard, and his sweetheart, the wench Bedos, and the
humpbacked Missonier; above them, there dwelt an old Spaniard, by the
name of Saavedra, and his wife; he was a political refugee who had
sought protection in France.

On the afternoon of the twenty-first of March, the soldier, Colard, was
standing at the corner of the Rue de l'Ambrague, playing a monotonous
air on his flute, one that he had learned from the shepherds of the
Pyrenees. The shopkeeper, Galtier, came up the road, stood still, made
a pretense of listening, but finally interrupted the musician,
addressing him severely: "Why do you gad about and pretend to be
ignorant