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