For a moment he fumbled in his pocket. Then he drew out an envelope, which he handed me. On it were signs quite cabalistic and figures equally abstruse. Yet from it there emanated an odor of orris, and I could not but notice that it was addressed to the marquis at a club. It naturally occurred to me that in addition to the distractions that he admitted he probably had others that he concealed. I am not censorious, and in view of the lady with the diamond tooth, I did not blame him in the least.
“There,” he resumed, “are the component parts. I jotted them on that envelope,” he interrupted himself to explain, “because it was the only bit of paper I had. But that is the formula.”
With that he ran on into technical terms, which conveyed no meaning to me, and my attention wandered until arrested by an entirely intelligible mention of flesh and blood.
“Human?” I asked, with pardonable surprise.
“Yes,” he answered, “that is best. But nowadays people have such prejudices. Yet there is the alcahest.”
He paused, glanced at the envelope, from it to me, and then, with that grace of manner which only Latins have, apologized for the dissertation. “Anything theoretical is so tiresome,” he added, in his winning way. “Yet if by chance the subject has the merit of interesting you, I should be glad if you would accompany me to my shop. My home,” he continued, “is in the Avenue Marceau, but for this work I have a maisonnette in the Rue de la Pompe, which I fitted up expressly. There I could have the pleasure of showing you an experiment or two.”
The stupefactions of the Subura claimed me still, I had counted on a long afternoon at the Library. I was stupid enough to prefer the society of a dead empress to a living alchemist, and I thanked him. Whereupon, after paying our scores—scores that included strawberries at a franc apiece, which, I mind me now, were fully worth it—we got out into the sunshine and absinthe of the street, where, little dreaming in what dramatic circumstances I was to see him again, we parted.
The dead empress detained me in Paris until, ejected by the heat, I ran down to Étretat. There, at the Casino one noon when looking over the Figaro, I jumped as though a dog had bitten me. I think anyone else might have done so, too. I had happened on the account—with which all the world has since been familiar—of the arrest of the Marquis de Parabole for murder.
On the esplanade without was the usual throng of people that gathers there during the hour that precedes the déjeuner and succeeds the dip. Among them was my old friend, Mrs. Manhattan. Thinking that I might furnish a fillip for her breakfast, I approached her.
I have sometimes thought that horrors appeal to women more than they do to men. I am often in error; I may have been then, yet, as I greeted this lady, it seemed to me that she was reveling in the revelations. It is true that she knew De Parabole, and acquaintance with people lends an admitted charm to anything that you may read about them. The worse it is the better you like it. Mrs. Manhattan was radiant. From the manner in which she spoke it seemed to me that nothing had pleased her more since the day the news reached her of Sally’s engagement. I presumed to say as much, but she turned on me quite viciously.
“When a man kills his wife—” she began.
“His wife!” I exclaimed. “The Figaro did not say that.”
“Bother the Figaro! It was his wife he killed. First he took her money, now he takes her life. If a man marries a Hottentot, then, Hottentot though she be, he ought to treat her decently, instead of which, after making her life a curse, he boils her up in a cauldron.”
“Nonsense!” I threw in. “Besides, she isn’t a Hottentot; she is a Brazilian.”
“It is quite the same to me,” Mrs. Manhattan, with superb indifference to ethnology, threw back. “He ought to be drawn and quartered. In my presence once he contradicted her flatly.”
“Yes, that is just it,” I managed to remark. “A woman will act on a man’s nerves day in, day out, and if, under constant fire, his nerves once give way and he calls his soul his own, he is nothing more or less than a brute.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Manhattan, with great irony, retorted; “that’s right. Justify him entirely. A man who murders his wife ought to decorated. I know all that. I have heard it before. But only in France. And since in France you feel as Frenchmen do, I can’t see why you don’t run up and congratulate him.”
Abashed and hushed, I had no recourse but to retreat. When, a few weeks later, I reached Paris, the preliminary examination had been concluded and the trial was announced. At that
