Harassed by interrogations, taken and retaken through the skein of clever questions, careless of the traps laid for him, Cabuche obstinately abided by his first version. He was passing along the road, breathing the fresh night air, when an individual brushed against him as he tore headlong away. The fugitive dashed by him so rapidly in the obscurity, that he could not even say which way he fled. Then, seized with anxiety and having cast a glance at the house, he perceived that the door stood wide open, and he ended by making up his mind to enter and go upstairs. There he found the dead woman, who was still warm, and who looked at him with her great eyes. In lifting her on the bed, thinking her still alive, he covered himself with blood. That was all he knew, and he repeated the same tale, never varying in a single detail, with an air of confining himself to a story arranged beforehand. When an effort was made to make him say something more, he looked wild, and remained silent, after the fashion of a man of limited intelligence who did not understand. The first time M. Denizet addressed questions to him on the subject of his intense passion for the deceased, he became very red, like some lad reproached with his first love affair; and he denied, he resisted the accusation of having thought of becoming intimate with this lady, as if it was something very wicked and unavowable, a delicate and also a mysterious matter, buried in the innermost recess of his heart, and which he was not called upon to unbosom to anyone. No, no! He did not love her. He never desired any intimacy with her. They would never make him speak of what seemed to him a profanation, now that she was dead. But this obstinacy in denying a fact that several of the witnesses affirmed, turned against him. Naturally, according to the theory of the prosecution, it was to his interest to conceal his furious passion. And when the examining-magistrate, assembling all the proofs, sought to tear the truth from him by striking a decisive blow, accusing him point blank of murder and rape, he flew into a mad rage of protestation. He do that! he who respected as a saint! The gendarmes who were called in, had to put restraint on him; while he, with great oaths, talked of strangling the whole show. The examining-magistrate put him down as a most dangerous, cunning scoundrel, but whose violence broke out in spite of all, and proved a sufficient avowal of the crimes he denied.