iliation, Isidore had dropped the newspaper
and sunk into his chair, with his face buried in his hands.

Panting, shaken with excitement by this incredible story, the crowd had
come gradually nearer and was now pressing round.

With a thrill of anguish, they waited for the words which he would say
in reply, the objections which he would raise.

He did not stir.

Valmeras gently uncrossed his hands and raised his head.

Isidore Beautrelet was weeping.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE TREATISE OF THE NEEDLE

It is four o'clock in the morning. Isidore has not returned to the
Lycee Janson. He has no intention of returning before the end of the
war of extermination which he has declared against Lupin. This much he
swore to himself under his breath, while his friends drove off with
him, all faint and bruised, in a cab.

A mad oath! An absurd and illogical war! What can he do, a single,
unarmed stripling, against that phenomenon of energy and strength? On
which side is he to attack him? He is unassailable. Where to wound him?
He is invulnerable. Where to get at him? He is inaccessible.

Four o'clock in the morning. Isidore has again accepted his
schoolfellow's hospitality. Standing before the chimney in his bedroom,
with his elbows flat on the mantel-shelf and his two fists under his
chin, he stares at his image in the looking-glass. He is not crying
now, he can shed no more tears, nor fling himself about on his bed, nor
give way to despair, as he has been doing for the last two hours and
more. He wants to think, to think and understand.

And he does not remove his eyes from those same eyes reflected in the
glass, as though he hoped to double his powers of thought by
contemplating his pensive image, as though he hoped to find at the back
of that mirrored Beautrelet the unsolvable solution of what he does not
find within himself.

He stands thus until six o'clock, and, little by little, the question
presents itself to his mind with the strictness of an equation, bare
and dry and cleared of all the details that complicate and obscure it.

Yes, he has made a mistake. Yes, his reading of the document is all
wrong. The word aiguille does not point to the castle on the Creuse.
Also, the word demoiselles cannot be applied to Raymonde de Saint-Veran
and her cousin, because the text of the document dates back for
centuries.

Therefore, all must be done over again, from the beginning.

How?

One piece of evidence alone w