CHAPTER VI.

THE attorney for the Republic called in the Examining Magistrate. Nothing more was to be done. The Magistrate had studied the position of the corpse, examined the wound, and now, having told M. Ginory his impressions, he did not hide from him his belief that the crime had been committed by a professional, as the stroke of the knife across the throat had been given neatly, scientifically, according to all the established rules.

"One might well take it for the work of a professional butcher."

"Yes, without doubt, M. Ginory; but one does not know. Brute force--a strong blow--can produce exactly what science can."

More agitated than he wished to appear by the strange conversation between the Agent of Surete and himself, the Examining Magistrate stood at the foot of the corpse and gazed, with a fixity almost fierce, not at the gaping wound of which M. Jacquelin des Audrays had spoken to him, but at those eyes,--those fixed eyes, those eyes which no opacity had yet invaded, which, open, frightful, seemingly burning with anger, menacing, full of accusations of some sort and animated with vengeance, gave him a look, immovable, most powerful.

It was true! it was true! They lived! those eyes spoke. They cried to him for justice. They retained the expression of some atrocious vision: the expression of violent rage. They menaced some one--who? If the picture of some one was graven there, was it not the last image reflected on the little mirror of the retina? What if a face was reflected there! What if it was still retained in the depths of those wide-open eyes! That strange creature, Bernardet, half crazy, enthused with new ideas, with the mysteries which traverse chimerical brains, troubled him--Ginory, a man of statistics and of facts.

But truly those dead eyes seemed to appeal, to speak, to designate some one. What more eloquent, what more terrible witness could there be than the dead man himself, if it was possible for his eyes to speak; if that organ of life should contain, shut up within it, preserved, the secret of death? Bernardet, whose eyes never left the magistrate's face, ought to have been content, for it plainly expressed doubt, a hesitation, and the police officer heard him cursing under his breath.

"Folly! Stupidity! Bah! we shall see!"

Bernardet was filled with hope. M. Ginory, the Examining Magistrate, was, moreover, convinced that, for the present, and the sooner the better, the corpse should be sent to the Morgue. There, only, could a thorough and scientific examination be made. The reporter listened intently to the conversation, and Mme. Moniche clasped her hands, more and more agonized by that word Morgue, which, among the people, produces the same terror that that other word, which means, however, careful attendance, scientific treatment and safety,--hospital, does.

Nothing was now to be done except to question some of the neighbors and to take a sketch of the salon. Bernardet said to the Magistrate: "My photograph will give you that!" While some one went out to get a hearse, the Magistrates went away, the police officer placed a guard in front of the house. The crowd was constantly increasing and becoming more and more curious, violently excited and eager to see the spectacle--the murdered man borne from his home.

Bernardet did not allow M. Ginory to go away without asking respectfully if he would be allowed to photograph the dead man's eye. Without giving him a formal answer, M. Ginory simply told him to be present at the autopsy at the Morgue. Evidently if the Magistrate had not been already full of doubt his reply would have been different. Why did that inferior officer have the audacity to give his opinion on the subject of conducting a judicial investigation? M. Ginory would long before this have sent him about his business if he had not become suddenly interested in him. In his quality of Judge he had come to know Bernardet's history and his exploits in the service. No more capable man, in his line, could be found. He was perfectly and utterly devoted to his profession. Some strange tales were told of his methods. It was he who once passed an entire night on a bench, pretending intoxication, in order to gain sufficient information to enable him to arrest a murderer in the morning in a wretched hovel at La Vilette--a murderer armed to the teeth. It was Bernardet who, without arms--as all those agents--caught the famous bandit, the noted Taureau de la Glaciere, a foreign Hercules, who had strangled his mistress. Bernardet arrested him by holding to his temple the cold neck of a bottle and saying, "Hands up or I fire!" Now what the bandit took for the cold muzzle of a pistol was a vial containing some medicine which Bernardet had purchased of a pharmacist for his liver.

Deeds of valor against thieves, malefactors and insurrectionists abounded in Bernardet's life; and M. Ginory had just discovered in this man, whom he believed simply endowed with the activity and keenness of a hunting dog, an intelligence singularly watchful, deep and complicated. Bernardet, who had nothing more to do until the body should be taken to the Morgue, left the house directly after the Magistrates.

"Where are you going?" asked Paul Rodier, the reporter.

"Home. A few steps from here."

"May I go along with you?" asked the journalist.

"To find an occasion to make me speak? But I know nothing! I suspect nothing; I shall say nothing!"

"Do you believe that it is the work of a thief, or revenge?"

"I am certain that it was no thief. Nothing in the apartment was touched. As for the rest, who knows?"

"M. Bernardet," laughingly said the reporter, as he walked along by the officer's side, "you do not wish to speak."

"What good will that do?" Bernardet replied, also laughingly; "it will not prevent you from publishing an interview."

"You think so. _Au revoir!_ I must hurry and make my copy. And you?"

"I? A photograph."

They separated, and Bernardet entered his house. His daughters had grieved over his sudden departure on Sunday on his fete day. They met him with joyous shouts when he appeared, and threw themselves upon him. "Papa! Here is papa!"

Mme. Bernardet was also happy. They could go then to the garden and finish the picture. But their joy subsided, night had fallen, and Bernardet, preoccupied, wished to shut himself up so that he might reflect on all that had happened, and perhaps to work a little, even to-day.

"It is thy fete day, Bernardet. Wilt thou not rest to-day?"

"I can rest at dinner, dear. Until then, I must use the time reading over a mass of evidence."

"Then thou wilt need a lamp?" asked Mme. Bernardet.

"Yes, my dear; light the lamp."

Next to their bedchamber M. Bernardet had fitted up a little room for his private use. It was a tiny den, in which was a mahogany table loaded with books and papers, and at which he worked when he had time, reading, annotating, copying from the papers, and collecting extracts for hours at a time. No one was allowed to enter this room, filled with old papers. Mme. Bernardet well called it "a nest of microbes." Bernardet found pleasure in this sporadic place, which in Summer was stifling. In Winter he worked without a fire.

Mme. Bernardet was unhappy as she saw that their holiday was spoiled. But she very well knew that when her husband was devoured with curiosity, carried away by a desire to elucidate a puzzle, there was nothing to be said. He listened to no remonstrances, and the daughters knew that when they asked if their father was not coming to renew his games with them they were obliged to content themselves with the excuse which they knew so well from having heard it so often: "Papa is studying out a crime!"

Bernardet was anxious to read over his notes, the verification of his hopes, of those so-called certainties of to-day. That is why he wished to be alone. As soon as he had closed the door he at once, from among the enormous piles of dust-laden books and files of old newspapers, with the unerring instinct of the habitual searcher who rummages through book stalls, drew forth a gray-covered pamphlet in which he had read, with feverish astonishment, the experiments and report of Dr. Vernois upon the application of photography in criminal researches. He quickly seated himself, and with trembling fingers eagerly turned over the leaves of the book so often read and studied, and came to the report of the member of the Academy of Medicine; he compared it with the proof submitted by Dr. Bourion, of the Medical Society, in which it was stated that the most learned savants had seen nothing.

"Seen nothing, or wished to see nothing, perhaps!" he murmured.

The light fell upon the photograph which had been sent, a long time before, to the Society, and Bernardet set himself to study out the old crime with the most careful attention; with the passion of a paleographer deciphering a palimpsest. This poor devil of a police officer, in his ardent desire to solve the vexing problem, brought to it the same ardor and the same faith as a bibliophile. He went over and over with the method of an Examining Magistrate all that old forgotten affair, and in the solitude and silence of his little room the last reflections of the setting sun falling on his papers and making pale the light of his lamp, he set himself the task of solving, like a mathematical problem, that question which he had studied, but which he wished to know from the very beginning, without any doubts, before seeing M. Ginory again at the Morgue, beside the body of M. Rovere. He took his pamphlet and read: "The photograph sent to the Society of Medical Jurisprudence by Dr. Bourion taken upon the retina of the eye of a woman who had been murdered the 14th of June, 1868, represents the moment when the assassin, after having struck the mother, kills the infant, and the dog belonging to the house leaps toward the unfortunate little victim to save it."

Then studying, turn by turn, the photograph yellowed by time, and the article which described it, Bernardet satisfied himself, and learned the history by heart.

M. Gallard, General Secretary of the Society, after having carefully hidden the back part of the photograph, had circulated it about among the members with this note: "Enigma of Medical Jurisprudence." And no one had solved the tragic enigma. Even when he had explained, no one could see in the photograph what Dr. Bourion saw there. Some were able on examining that strange picture to see in the black and white haze some figures as singular and dissimilar as those which the amiable Polonius perceived in the clouds under the suggestion of Hamlet.

Dr. Vernois, appointed to write a report on Dr. Bourion's communication, asked him then how the operation had been conducted, and Dr. Bourion had given him these details, which Bernardet was now reading and studying: The assassination had taken place on Sunday between noon and 4 o'clock; the extraction of the eyes from their orbits had not been made until the following day at 6 o'clock in the evening.

The experiment on the eyes, those terribly accusing eyes of this dead man, could be made twenty-four hours earlier than that other experiment. The image--if there was any image--ought to be, in consequence, more clearly defined than in Dr. Bourion's experiment.

"About 6 o'clock in the evening," thought Bernardet, "and the photographic light was sufficient."

Dr. Bourion had taken pictures of both of the child's eyes as well as both of the mother's eyes. The child's eyes showed nothing but hazy clouds. But the mother's eyes were different. Upon the left eye, next to a circular section back of the iris, a delicately marked image of a dog's head appeared. On the same section of the right eye, another picture; one could see the assassin raising his arm to strike and the dog leaping to protect his little charge.

"With much good will, it must be confessed," thought Bernardet, looking again and again at the photograph, "and with much imagination, too. But it was between fifty and fifty-two hours after the murder that the proof was taken, while this time it will be while the body is still warm that the experiment will be tried."

Seventeen times already had Dr. Vernois experimented on animals; sometimes just after he had strangled them, again when they had died from Prussic acid. He had held in front of their eyes a simple object which could be easily recognized. He had taken out the eyes and hurried with them to the photographer. He had, in order to better expose the retina to photographic action, made a sort of Maltese cross, by making four incisions on the edge of the sclerotic. He removed the vitreous humor, fixed it on a piece of card with four pins and submitted the retina as quickly as possible to the camera.

In re-reading the learned man's report, Bernardet studied, pored over, carefully scrutinized the text, investigated the dozen proofs submitted to the Society of Medical Jurisprudence by Dr. Vernois:

Retina of a cat's eye killed by Prussic acid; Vernois had held the animal in front of the bars of the cage in which it was confined. No result!

Retina of a strangled dog's eye. A watch was held in front of its eyes. No result!

Retina of a dog killed by a strangulation. A bunch of shining keys was held in front of his eyes. No result!

Retina of the eye of a strangled dog. An eyeglass held in front of its eyes. Photograph made two hours after death. Nothing! In all Dr. Vernois's experiments--nothing! Nothing!

Bernardet repeated the word angrily. Still he kept on; he read page after page. But all this was twenty-six years ago--photography has made great strides since then. What wonderful results have been obtained! The skeleton of the human body seen through the flesh! The instantaneous photograph! The kinetoscopic views! Man's voice registered for eternity in the phonograph! The mysterious dragged forth into the light of day! Many hitherto unknown secrets become common property! The invisible, even the invisible, the occult, placed before our eyes, as a spectacle!

"One does not know all that may be done with a kodak," murmured Bernardet.

As he ascertained, in re-reading Dr. Vernois's report on "The Application of Photography to Medical Jurisprudence," the savant himself, even while denying the results of which Dr. Bourion spoke in his communication, devoted himself to the general consideration upon the role which photography ought to play in medical jurisprudence. Yes, in 1869, he asked that in the researches on poisonous substances, where the microscope alone had been used, photography should be applied. He advocated what in our day is so common, the photographing of the features of criminals, their deformities, their scars, their tattooings. He demanded that pictures should be taken of an accused person in many ways, without wigs and with them, with and without beards, in diverse costumes.

"These propositions," thought Bernardet, "seem hardly new; it is twenty-six years since they were discovered, and now they seem as natural as that two and two make four. In twenty-six years from now, who knows what science will have done?

"Vernois demanded that wounds be reproduced, their size, the instruments with which the crime was committed, the leaves of plants in certain cases of poisoning, the shape of the victim's garments, the prints of their hands and feet, the interior view of their rooms, the signature of certain accused affected with nervous disorders, parts of bodies and of bones, and, in fact, everything in any way connected with the crime. It was said that he asked too much. Did he expect judges to make photographs? To-day, everything that Vernois demanded in 1869, has been done, and, in truth, the instantaneous photograph has almost superseded the minutes of an investigation.

"We photograph a spurious bank note. It is magnified, and, by the absence of a tiny dot the proof of the alteration is found. On account of the lack of a dot the forger is detected. The savant, Helmholtz, was the discoverer of this method of detecting these faults. Two bank notes, one authentic, the other a forgery, were placed side by side in a stereoscope of strong magnifying power, when the faults were at once detected. Helmholtz's experiment probably seemed fantastic to the forger condemned by a stereoscope. Oh, well, to-day ought not a like experiment on the retina of a dead man's eye give a like result?

"Instruments have been highly perfected since the time when Dr. Bourion made his experiments, and if the law of human physiology has not changed the seekers of invisible causes must have rapidly advanced in their mysterious pursuits. Who knows whether, at the instant of the last agony, that the dying person does not put all the intensity of life into the retina, giving a hundredfold power to that last supreme look?"

At this point of his reflections Bernardet experienced some hesitation. While he was not thoroughly acquainted with physiology and philosophy, yet he had seen so much, so many things; had known so many strange occurrences, and had studied many men. He knew--for he had closely questioned wretches who had been saved from drowning at the very last possible moment, some of whom had attempted suicide, others who had been almost drowned through accident, and each one had told him that his whole life, from his earliest recollection, had flashed through his mind in the instant of mortal agony. Yes, a whole lifetime in one instant of cerebral excitement!

Had savants been able to solve this wonderful mystery? The _resume_ of an existence in one vibration! Was it possible? Yet--Bernardet still used the word.

And why, in an analogous sensation, could not the look of a dying man be seized in an intensity lasting an instant, as memory brought in a single flash so many diverse remembrances?

"I know, since it is the imagination, and that the dead cannot see, while the image on the retina is a fact, a fact contradicted by wiser men than I." Bernardet thought on these mysteries until his head began to ache.

"I shall make myself ill over it," he thought. "And there is something to be done."

Then in his dusty little room, his brain overexcited, he became enthused with one idea. His surroundings fell away from him, he saw nothing--everything disappeared--the books, the papers, the walls, the visible objects, as did also the objections, the denials, the demonstrative impossibilities. And absolute conviction seized him to the exclusion of all extraneous surroundings. This conviction was absolute, instinctive, irresistible, powerful, filling him with entire faith.

"This unknown thing I will find. What is to be done I will do," he declared to himself.

He threw the pamphlet on the table, arose from his chair and descended to the dining-room, where his wife and children were waiting for him. He rubbed his hands with glee, and his face looked joyous.

"Didst thou discover the trail?" Mme. Bernardet asked very simply, as a working woman would ask her husband if he had had a good day. The eldest of the little girls rushed toward him.

"Papa, my dear little papa!"

"My darling!"

The child asked her father in a sweet voice: "Art thou satisfied with thy crime, papa?"

"We will not talk about that," Bernardet replied. "To table! After dinner I will develop the pictures which I have taken with my kodak, but let us amuse ourselves now; it is my fete day; I wish to forget all about business. Let us dine now and be as happy as possible."