He suddenly remembered what Paul Rodier had said to him. "Read my journal!" This woman in black, found in the province, did she really exist? Had the novelist written a romance in order to follow the example of his friend? He looked over the paper to see if Paul Rodier had collaborated, as his friend had. Bernardet skipped over the headlines and glanced at the theatrical news. "Politics--they are all the same to me--Ministerial crisis--nothing new about that. That could as well be published in yesterday's paper as in to-day's! 'The Crime of the Boulevard de Clichy'--ah! Good! Very good! We shall see." And he began to read. Had Paul Rodier invented all the information to which he had treated the public? What was certain was that the police officer frowned and now gave strict attention to what he was reading, as if weighing the reporter's words. Rodier had republished the biography of the ex-Consul. M. Rovère had been mixed, in South America, in violent dramas. He was a romantic person, about whom more than one adventure in Buenos Ayres was known. The reporter had gained his information from an Argentine journal, the _Prensa_, established in Paris, and whose editor, in South America, had visited, intimately, the French Consul. The appearance of a woman in black, those visits made on fixed dates, as on anniversaries, revealed an intimacy, a relationship perhaps, of the murdered man with that unknown woman. The woman was young, elegant and did not live in Paris. Rodier had set himself to discover her retreat, her name; and perhaps, thanks to her, to unravel the mystery which still enveloped the murder. "_Heuh!_ That is not very precise information," thought the police officer. But it at least awoke Bernardet's curiosity and intelligence. It solved no problem, but it put one. M. de Sartines's famous "_search for the woman_" came naturally to Paul Rodier's pen. And he finished the article with some details about Jacques Dantin, the intimate, the only friend of Louis Pièrre Rovère; and the reporter, when he had written this, was still ignorant that Dantin was under arrest. "To-morrow," said Bernardet to himself, "he will give us Dantin's biography. He tells me nothing new in his report. And yet"----He folded up the paper and laid it on the table, and while sipping his cordial he thought of that mysterious visitor--the woman in black--and told himself that truly the trail must be there. He would see Moniche and his wife again; he would question them; he would make a thorough search. "But what for? We have the guilty man. It is a hundred to one that the assassin is behind bars. The woman might be an accomplice."