londe was madly in love with
a young man who was never to be seen, and was supposed to be deaf to all
the fair Manon's proofs of devotion. Mystery on mystery. However, this
youth, under the diligent attentions of police spies, was soon seen
and identified as an escaped convict, the famous hero of the Corsican
vendetta, the handsome Theodore Calvi, known as Madeleine.

A man was turned on to entrap Calvi, one of those double-dealing buyers
of stolen goods who serve the thieves and the police both at once; he
promised to purchase the silver and the watch and chain. At the moment
when the dealer of the Cour Saint-Guillaume was counting out the cash
to Theodore, dressed as a woman, at half-past six in the evening, the
police came in and seized Theodore and the property.

The inquiry was at once begun. On such thin evidence it was impossible
to pass a sentence of death. Calvi never swerved, he never contradicted
himself. He said that a country woman had sold him these objects at
Argenteuil; that after buying them, the excitement over the murder
committed at Nanterre had shown him the danger of keeping this plate and
watch and chain in his possession, since, in fact, they were proved
by the inventory made after the death of the wine merchant, the widow
Pigeau's uncle, to be those that were stolen from her. Compelled at last
by poverty to sell them, he said he wished to dispose of them by the
intervention of a person to whom no suspicion could attach.

And nothing else could be extracted from the convict, who, by his
taciturnity and firmness, contrived to insinuate that the wine-merchant
at Nanterre had committed the crime, and that the woman of whom he,
Theodore, had bought them was the wine-merchant's wife. The unhappy
man and his wife were both taken into custody; but, after a week's
imprisonment, it was amply proved that neither the husband nor the wife
had been out of their house at the time. Also, Calvi failed to recognize
in the wife the woman who, as he declared, had sold him the things.

As it was shown that Calvi's mistress, implicated in the case, had spent
about a thousand francs since the date of the crime and the day when
Calvi tried to pledge the plate and trinkets, the evidence seemed strong
enough to commit Calvi and the girl for trial. This murder being the
eighteenth which Theodore had committed, he was condemned to death for
he seemed certainly to be guilty of this skilfully contrived crime.
Though he di