"Oh, horror! Oh, the vile truth! Rosalie has spoken. Dear God, I beseech Thee, give me time to write. . . . Paul, you could never imagine. . . . You must be told before I die. . . . Paul. . . ." The rest of the page was torn out; and the following pages, to the end of the month, were blank. Had Élisabeth had the time and the strength to write down what Rosalie had revealed to her? This was a question which Paul did not even ask himself. What cared he for those revelations and the darkness that once again and for good shrouded the truth which he could no longer hope to discover? What cared he for vengeance or Prince Conrad or Major Hermann or all those savages who tortured and slew women? Élisabeth was dead. She had, so to speak, died before his eyes. Nothing outside that fact was worth a thought or an effort. Faint and stupefied by a sudden fit of cowardice, his eyes still fixed on the diary in which his poor wife had jotted down the phases of the most cruel martyrdom imaginable, he felt an immense longing for death and oblivion steal slowly over him. Élisabeth was calling to him. Why go on fighting? Why not join her? Then some one tapped him on the shoulder. A hand seized the revolver which he was holding; and Bernard said: "Drop that, Paul. If you think that a soldier has the right to kill himself at the present time, I will leave you free to do so when you have heard what I have to say." Paul made no protest. The temptation to die had come to him, but almost without his knowing it; and, though he would perhaps have yielded to it, in a moment of madness, he was still in the state of mind in which a man soon recovers his consciousness. "Speak," he said. "It will not take long. Three minutes will give me time to explain. Listen to me. I see, from the writing, that you have found a diary kept by Élisabeth. Does it confirm what you knew?" "Yes." "When Élisabeth wrote it, was she threatened with death as well as Jérôme and Rosalie?" "Yes." "And all three were shot on the day when you and I arrived at Corvigny, that is to say, on Wednesday, the sixteenth?" "Yes." "It was between five and six in the afternoon, on the day before the Thursday when we arrived here, at the Château d'Ornequin?" "Yes, but why these questions?" "Why? Look at this, Paul. I took from you and I hold in my hand the splinter of shell which you removed from the wall of the lodge at the exact spot where Élisabeth was shot. Here it is. There was a lock of hair still sticking to it." "Well?" "Well, I had a talk just now with an adjutant of artillery, who was passing by the château; and the result of our conversation and of his inspection was that the splinter does not belong to a shell fired from a 75-centimeter gun, but to a shell fired from a 155-centimeter gun, a Rimailho." "I don't understand."