"Excellent. If everything goes as you telephoned, the police will be utterly at sea."
"That's what they're there for. Let's get him on board."
They carried into the motor a sort of long sack shaped like a human being and apparently rather heavy. And the prince said:
"Go to Versailles, Octave, Rue de la Vilaine. Stop outside the Hôtel des Deux-Empereurs."
"Why, it's a filthy hotel," observed the doctor. "I know it well; a regular hovel."
"You needn't tell me! And it will be a hard piece of work, for me, at least… But, by Jove, I wouldn't sell this moment for a fortune! Who dares pretend that life is monotonous?"
They reached the Hôtel des Deux-Empereurs. A muddy alley; two steps down; and they entered a passage lit by a flickering lamp.
Sernine knocked with his fist against a little door.
A waiter appeared, Philippe, the man to whom Sernine had given orders, that morning, concerning Gérard Baupré.
"Is he here still?" asked the prince.
"Yes."
"The rope?"
"The knot is made."
"He has not received the telegram he was hoping for?"
"I intercepted it: here it is."
Sernine took the blue paper and read it:
"Gad!" he said. "It was high time. This is to promise him a thousand francs for to-morrow. Come, fortune is on my side. A quarter to twelve… In a quarter of an hour, the poor devil will take a leap into eternity. Show me the way, Philippe. You stay here, Doctor."
The waiter took the candle. They climbed to the third floor, and, walking on tip-toe, went along a low and evil-smelling corridor, lined with garrets and ending in a wooden staircase covered with the musty remnants of a carpet.
"Can no one hear me?" asked Sernine.
"No. The two rooms are quite detached. But you must be careful not to make a mistake: he is in the room on the left."
"Very good. Now go downstairs. At twelve o'clock, the doctor, Octave and you are to carry the fellow up here, to where we now stand, and wait till I call you."
The wooden staircase had ten treads, which the prince climbed with definite caution. At the top was a landing with two doors. It took Sernine quite five minutes to open the one of the right without breaking the silence with the least sound of a creaking hinge.
A light gleamed through the darkness of the room. Feeling his way, so as not to knock against one of the chairs, he made for that light. It came from the next room and filtered through a glazed door covered with a tattered hanging.
The prince pulled the threadbare stuff aside. The panes were of ground glass, but scratched in parts, so that, by applying one eye, it was easy to see all that happened in the other room.
Sernine saw a man seated at a table facing him. It was the poet, Gérard Baupré. He was writing by the light of a candle.
Above his head hung a rope, which was fastened to a hook fixed in the ceiling. At the end of the rope was a slip-knot.
A faint stroke sounded from a clock in the street.
"Five minutes to twelve," thought Sernine. "Five minutes more."
The young man was still writing. After a moment, he put down his pen, collected the ten or twelve sheets of paper which he had covered and began to read them over.
What he read did not seem to please him, for an expression of discontent passed across his face. He tore up his manuscript and burnt the pieces in the flame of the candle.
Then, with a fevered hand, he wrote a few words on a clean sheet, signed it savagely and rose from his chair.
But, seeing the rope at ten inches above his head, he sat down again suddenly with a great shudder of alarm.
Sernine distinctly saw his pale features, his lean cheeks, against which he pressed his clenched fists. A tear trickled slowly down his face, a single, disconsolate tear. His eyes gazed into space, eyes terrifying in their unutterable sadness, eyes that already seemed to behold the dread unknown.
And it was so young a face! Cheeks still so smooth, with not a blemish, not a wrinkle! And blue eyes, blue like an eastern sky!.
Midnight.. the twelve tragic strokes of midnight, to which so many a despairing man has hitched the last second of his existence!
At the twelfth stroke, he stood up again and, bravely this time, without trembling, looked at the sinister rope. He even tried to give a smile, a poor smile, the pitiful grimace of the doomed man whom death has already seized for its own.
Swiftly he climbed the chair and took the rope in one hand.
For a moment, he stood there, motionless: not that he was hesitating or lacking in courage. But this was the supreme moment, the one minute of grace which a man allows himself before the fatal deed.
He gazed at the squalid room to which his evil destiny had brought him, the hideous paper on the walls, the wretched bed.
On the table, not a book: all were sold. Not a photograph, not a letter: he had no father, no mother, no relations. What was there to make him cling to life?
With a sudden movement he put his head into the slip-knot and pulled at the rope until the noose gripped his neck.
And, kicking the chair from him with both feet, he leapt into space.
Ten seconds, fifteen seconds passed, twenty formidable, eternal seconds..
The body gave two or three jerks. The feet had instinctively felt for a resting-place. Then nothing moved..
A few seconds more… The little glazed door opened.
Sernine entered.
Without the least haste he took the sheet of paper to which the young man had set his signature, and read:
"Tired of living, ill, penniless, hopeless, I am taking my own life. Let no one be accused of my death.
"30 April."
He put back the paper on the table where it could be seen, picked up the chair and placed it under the young man's feet. He himself climbed up on the table and, holding the body close to him, lifted it up, loosened the slip-knot and passed the head through it.
The body sank into his arms. He let it slide along the table and, jumping to the floor, laid it on the bed.
Then, with the same coolness, he opened the door on the passage:
"Are you there, all the three of you?" he whispered.
Some one answered from the foot of the wooden staircase near him:
"We are here. Are we to hoist up our bundle?"
"Yes, come along!"
He took the candle and showed them a light.
The three men trudged up the stairs, carrying the sack in which the "fellow" was tied up.
"Put him here," he said, pointing to the table.
With a pocket-knife, he cut the cords round the sack. A white sheet appeared, which he flung back. In the sheet was a corpse, the corpse of Pierre Leduc.
"Poor Pierre Leduc!" said Sernine. "You will never know what you lost by dying so young! I should have helped you to go far, old chap. However, we must do without your services… Now then, Philippe, get up on the table; and you, Octave, on the chair. Lift up his head and fasten the slip-knot."
Two minutes later, Pierre Leduc's body was swinging at the end of the rope.
"Capital, that was quite simple! Now you can all of you go. You, Doctor, will call back here to-morrow morning; you will hear of the suicide of a certain Gérard Baupré: you understand, Gérard Baupré. Here is his farewell letter. You will send for the divisional surgeon and the commissary; you will arrange that neither