The commission of inquiry had become very attentive. The two commercial men's eyes were shining, and they smiled and looked with great interest at these gardens and pavilions, on which they had not bestowed a glance prior to their colleague's explanations. A grotto detained them for a long time. But when the doctor, seeing a house already attacked by the pick, said that he recognised it as the Count de Savigny's _petite maison_, well known on account of that nobleman's orgies, the whole commission left the Boulevard to go and visit the ruins. They climbed on to the fallen materials, entered the ground floor rooms by the windows, and as the workmen were away at their mid-day meal, they were able to linger there quite at their ease. They indeed remained there for a good half hour, examining the rosettes of the ceilings, the paintings above the doors, the strained mouldings of the plaster grown yellow with age. The doctor reconstructed the building. "Do you see," said he, "this room must be the banqueting hall. There was certainly an immense divan in that recess of the wall. And, indeed, I'm sure that a looking-glass surmounted the divan. See, there are the holdfasts of the glass. Oh! those fellows were scamps who knew deucedly well how to enjoy themselves!" The jurors would never have left these old stones which tickled their curiosity, if Aristide Saccard, growing impatient, had not said to them, laughing: "You may look as much as you like, the ladies are no longer here. Let's get to our business." Before leaving, however, the doctor climbed on to a mantelshelf, to delicately detach, with one blow of a pick, a little painted head of Cupid, which he slipped into the pocket of his frock-coat. They at length reached the end of their journey. The land which had formerly belonged to Madame Aubertot was very vast; the music-hall and the garden occupied barely more than half of the surface; a few unimportant houses were scattered about the rest of it. The new Boulevard cut obliquely across this large parallelogram, and this circumstance had quieted one of Saccard's fears; he had long imagined that only a corner of the music-hall would be removed by the new thoroughfare. Larsonneau therefore had received orders to open his mouth, as the bordering plots ought to at least quintuple in value. He was already threatening the city of Paris to avail himself of a recent decree authorising landowners to deliver up only the ground necessary for works of public utility.