izable! It has been said that the manner in which this
phenomenon was managed was a remarkable thing; it is true, for this
human body seemed literally to dissolve before this curious crowd, now
become silent and frightened. The work of death was accomplished there
publicly, thanks to the illusion of lighting. The livid man who smiled a
few moments before was motionless, fixed, then passing through some
singular changes, the flesh seemed to fall from him in----

Suddenly the play of lights made him disappear from the eyes of the
spectators and they saw, thanks to reflections made by mirrors, only a
skeleton. It was the world of spectres and the secret of the tombs
revealed to the crowd by a kind of scientific magic lantern.

Bernardet did not desire to wait longer to strike his blow--this was the
exact moment to do it--the psychological moment!

The eager look of the man in the sombrero revealed a deep trouble. There
was in this look something more than the curiosity excited by a novel
spectacle. The muscles of his pale face twitched as with physical
suffering; in his eyes Bernardet read an internal agony.

"Ah!" thought the police officer, "the living eye is a book which one
can read, as well as a dead man's eye."

Upon the stage the lights were rendering even more sinister the figurant
who was giving to this morbidly curious crowd the comedy of death. One
would have now thought it was one of those atrocious paintings made in
the studios of certain Spanish painters in the _putridero_ of a Valles
Leal. The flesh, by a remarkable scientific combination of lights, was
made to seem as if falling off, and presented the horrible appearance of
a corpse in a state of decomposition. The lugubrious vision made a very
visible shudder pass over the audience. Then Bernardet, drawing himself
up to his full height so as to get a good view of the face of this man
so much taller, and approaching as near to him as possible, in fact, so
that his elbow and upper arm touched the young man's, he slowly,
deliberately dropped, one by one, these words:

"That is about how M. Rovere ought to be now"----

And suddenly the young man's face expressed a sensation of fright, as
one sees in the face of a pedestrian who suddenly finds that he is about
to step upon a viper.

"Or how he will be soon!" added the little man, with an amiable smile.
Bernardet dissimulated under this amiability an intense joy. Holding his
arm and elbow in an apparentl