With a broad knife Bastide Grammont gave the old man a stab; Fualdes, by a superhuman effort, succeeded in breaking loose; he sprang up and ran, already mortally wounded, through the room; Bastide Grammont, pursuing, seized hold of him, threw him again on the table, the table rocked, one leg broke; now the dying man was placed upon two benches rapidly moved close to each other, and Bastide Grammont thrust the knife into his throat. With the last groan of the old man, Bancal came and his wife caught up the flowing blood in an earthen pot; the part that ran on the floor was scrubbed up by the women. In the pockets of the murdered man a five franc piece and several sous were found. Bastide Grammont threw the money into the apron of the Bancal woman, saying: "Take it! We are not killing him for his money." A key, too, was found; that Bastide kept. Madame Bancal had a hankering for the fine shirt of the dead man, and remarked covetously that it looked like a chorister's shirt; she was diverted from her desire, however, on being presented with an amethyst ring on Fualdes' finger. This ring was taken away the following day by a stranger for a consideration of ten francs. When Bach's recital with all its circumstantiality and its simulated completeness of strange and illuminating details became known, there lacked but little to hailing the imaginative scamp as a deliverer. Indignation fed belief, and criticism seemed treason. The public, the witnesses, the judges, the authorities, all believed in the deed and all began to join in invention. Bach and Bousquier, who were confronted with each other, quarreled and called each other liars; one claimed that lie had gone into the Bancal house before, the other after, the murder; one declared that he had assisted in the deed, the other that he had only lifted the body, which was wrapped in a sheet and bound with ropes. The half-witted Missonnier designated still another batch of persons whom he had seen in the Bancal house, two notaries from Alby and a cook. In Rose Feral's tavern, where all sorts of shady characters congregated, and old warlike exploits and thieveries were the subjects of discussion, on the night of the murder the talk fell upon the pillaging of a house, the property of a Liberal. This report was designed to heighten the apprehension of the quiet citizens, and that afterward all the conspirators, even well-to-do people, met in Bancal's house gave no cause for astonishment. Everything harmonized in the intricate, devilish plot; in the clothes of the dead Fualdes no money, on his fingers no ring, had been found; Grammont had the bailiff in his house as late as the seventeenth of March, and this circumstance, singled out at an opportune moment from the quagmire of lies, inspired security. Bastide was hopelessly entangled. The prisoners were thrown into a panic by the palpable agitation of the people; each one appeared guilty in the other's eyes, each one was ready to admit anything that