“The Courtesan Emilie would not see him again. The devil meddled with the affair, and carried a bone of Cartouche, who was beloved by Emilie, to place in her bed between her chemise and her skin. I know this, my eye has read this in the heart of the man who descends the steps of the charnel house. He comes there to take my bones from me.... He lights a lantern. He goes straight to my corpse. He does not see, then, that the eyes of my corpse are moving!... He draws out from under his cloak—a steel blade sharp and red in the rays from the lantern. He puts the lantern down, he catches me by the shoulders and leaves me half sitting against the wall, under the hole. He took my left hand with his left hand, and with his right hand he buried the steel blade in my wrist. I do not feel the blade in my wrist, but I see it. It turns around my wrist. It is going to cut it, already it has detached it. Now I commence to feel the blade! Life has come back into my wrist! Oh, yes, my wrist!... Oh, yes, my wrist!... One last blow with the blade and my left hand remains in his left hand. Oh, my poor wrist!... Yes! Yes! Yes! The life! The life! The life of a nerve! I tell you that it sufficed for the life of a nerve! Oh! Oh! Oh! The man howls and breaks his lantern with a kick. My hand is partly in the man’s hand, but by a great miracle of the ebbing life in my wrist, my hand, at the moment it leaves my arm, has seized the hand of the man! And the man cannot rid himself of my hand, which is stiffening in death, and which holds him! Ah! he moves about, he shakes, he howls, he shakes my hand, which holds him—which holds him. He pulls my hand with his right hand, but he cannot free himself thus of the wrist of a dead man’s hand! I see him as he flees from the charnel house, howling, bounding over the steps in the moonlight like a fool, like a madman, gesticulating with my wrist. “At this moment, above my head, a hand that I do not see, but which I feel, comes out of the wall and takes me by the hair! It pulls me, pulls me by the head. Oh, to cry out! To cry out! To cry out! But how can I cry out with those living teeth staving me in the neck and throat?” “And now, Cartouche, where art thou?” “I go into the darkness radiant in death.” CHAPTER XXI _The Result of the Operation_ |As soon as Théophraste had pronounced these words, M. Eliphaste made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. He leaned over the prostrate form, and blew impatiently on his eye. He said to him: “Awake thou, Théophraste Longuet!”