"Mad, yes, but capable of remembering certain details of her childhood. She must have recognized the brother with whom she grew up . . . and that recollection cost her her life." And he added, "Mad! But all those people were mad. . . . The mother was mad. . . . The father a dipsomaniac. . . . Altenheim a regular brute beast. . . . Isilda, a poor innocent . . . . As for the other, the murderer, he is the monster, the crazy lunatic. . . ." "Crazy? Do you think so, governor?" "Yes, crazy! With flashes of genius, of devilish cunning and intuition, but a crack-brained fool, a madman, like all that Malreich family. Only madmen kill and especially madmen of his stamp. For, after all . . ." He interrupted himself; and his face underwent so great a change that Doudeville was struck by it: "What's the matter, governor?" "Look." A man had entered and hung his hat--a soft, black felt hat--on a peg. He sat down at a little table, examined the bill of fare which a waiter brought him, gave his order and waited motionless, with his body stiff and erect and his two arms crossed over the table-cloth. And Lupin saw him full-face. He had a lean, hard visage, absolutely smooth and pierced with two sockets in the depths of which appeared a pair of steel-gray eyes. The skin seemed stretched from bone to bone, like a sheet of parchment, so stiff and so thick that not a hair could have penetrated through it. And the face was dismal and dull. No expression enlivened it. No thought seemed to abide under that ivory forehead; and the eye-lids, entirely devoid of lashes, never flickered, which gave the eyes the fixed look of the eyes in a statue. Lupin beckoned to one of the waiters: "Who is that gentleman?" "The one eating his lunch over there?" "Yes." "He is a customer. He comes here two or three times a week." "Can you tell me his name?" "Why, yes . . . Leon Massier." "Oh!" blurted Lupin, very excitedly. "L. M. . . . the same two letters . . . could it be Louis de Malreich?" He watched him eagerly. Indeed, the man's appearance agreed with Lupin's conjectures, with what he knew of him and of his hideous mode of existence. But what puzzled him was that look of death about him: where he anticipated life and fire, where he would have expected to find the torment, the disorder, the violent facial distortion of the great accursed, he beheld sheer impassiveness. He asked the waiter: "What does he do?" "I really can't say. He's a rum cove . . . He's always quite alone. . . . He never talks to anybody . . . We here don't even know the sound of his voice. . . . He points his finger at the dishes on the bill of fare which he wants. . . . He has finished in twenty minutes; then he pays and goes. . . ." "And he comes back again?" "Every three or four days. He's not regular."