lodge, making
over and mending garments for his neighbors, while his wife looked after
the house, swept the staircases, and complained of her lot.

Mme. Moniche found life hard and disagreeable, and regretted that it had
not given her what it promised when, at eighteen, and very pretty, she
had expected something better than to watch beside a tailor bent over
his work in a concierge's lodge. Into her life a tragedy had suddenly
precipitated itself, and Mme. Moniche found, that day, something to
brighten up her afternoon. Entering a moment before, the apartment
occupied by M. Rovere, she had found her lodger lying on his back, his
eyes fixed, his arms flung out, with a gash across his throat!

M. Rovere had lived alone in the house for many years, receiving a few
mysterious persons. Mme. Moniche looked after his apartment, entering by
using her own key whenever it was necessary; and her lodger had given
her permission to come there at any time to read the daily papers.

Mme. Moniche hurried down the stairs.

"M. Rovere is dead! M. Rovere has been murdered! His throat has been
cut! He has been assassinated!" And, pushing her husband out of the
door, she exclaimed:

"The police! Go for the police!"

This word "police" awakened in the tailor's mind, not the thought of the
neighboring Commissary, but the thought of the man to whom he felt that
he ought to appeal, whom he ought to consult. This man was the good
little M. Bernardet, who passed for a man of genius of his kind, at the
Surete, and for whom Moniche had often repaired coats and rehemmed
trousers.

From the mansion in the Boulevard de Clichy, where Moniche lived, to M.
Bernardet's house, was but a short distance, and the concierge knew the
way very well, as he had often been there. But the poor man was so
stupefied, so overwhelmed, by the sudden appearance of his wife in his
room, by the brutal revelation which came to him as the blow of a fist,
by the horrible manner of M. Rovere's death, that he lost his head.
Horrified, breathless, he asked the first passer-by where Bernardet
lived, and he ran as fast as he could in the direction pointed out.

Arrived at the grating, the worthy man, a little confused, stopped
short. He was very strongly moved. It seemed to him that he had been
cast into the agony of a horrible nightmare. An assassination in the
house! A murder in the Boulevard de Clichy in broad daylight, just over
his head, while he was quietly repairi