pt repeating: "Still
warm; yes, Monsieur Bernardet, still warm!"

CHAPTER II.

BERNARDET was quite an original character. Among the agents, some of
whom were very odd, and among the devoted subalterns, this little man,
with his singular mind, with his insatiable curiosity, reading anything
he could lay his hands on, passed for a literary person. His chief
sometimes laughingly said to him:

"Bernardet, take care! You have literary ambitions. You will begin to
dream of writing for the papers."

"Oh, no, Monsieur Morel--but what would you?--I am simply amusing
myself."

This was true. Bernardet was a born hunter. With a superior education,
he might have become a savant, a frequenter of libraries, passing his
life in working on documents and in deciphering manuscripts. The son of
a dairyman; brought up in a Lancastrian school; reading with avidity all
the daily papers; attracted by everything mysterious which happened in
Paris; having accomplished his military duty, he applied for admission
to the Police Bureau, as he would have embarked for the New World, for
Mexico, or for Tonquin, in order to travel in a new country. Then he
married, so that he might have, in his checkered existence, which was
dangerous and wearying,--a haven of rest, a fireside of peaceful joy.

So he lived a double life--tracking malefactors like a bloodhound, and
cultivating his little garden. There he devoured old books, for which he
had paid a few sous at some book stall; he read and pasted in old, odd
leaves, re-bound them himself, and cut clippings from papers. He filled
his round, bald head with a mass of facts which he investigated,
classified, put into their proper place, to be brought forth as occasion
demanded.

He was an inquisitive person, a very inquisitive person, indeed.
Curiosity filled his life. He performed with pleasure the most fatiguing
and repulsive tasks that fall to a police officer's lot. They satisfied
the original need of his nature, and permitted him to see everything, to
hear everything, to penetrate into the most curious mysteries. To-day,
in a dress suit with white tie, carelessly glancing over the crowds at
the opera, to discover the thieves who took opera glasses, which they
sent to accomplices in Germany to be sold; to-morrow, going in ragged
clothes to arrest a murderer in some cutthroat den in the Glaciere.

M. Bernardet had taken possession of the office of the most pow