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. Rovère 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 apparently careless manner close to his neighbor as he pronounced Rovère's name, Bernardet felt his neighbor's whole body tremble, and that he gave a very perceptible start. Why had he been so quickly moved by an unknown name if it had not recalled to his mind some frightful thought? The man might, of course, know, as the public did, all the details of the crime, but, with his strong, energetic face, his resolute look, he did not appear like a person who would be troubled by the recital of a murder, the description of a bloody affray, or even by the frightful scene which had just passed before his eyes in the hall.