I do not see why we should
not try the experiment. I have reflected upon it. Where is the
unsuitableness?"

"Ah, Monsieur le Juge," cried the agent, "if you permit it who knows but
that we may revolutionize medical jurisprudence?"

"Revolutionize, revolutionize!" Would the Examining Magistrate yet find
it an idiotic idea?

M. Ginory passed around the building and entered by a small door opening
on the Seine. The registrar followed him, and behind him came the police
agent. Bernardet wished to wait until the doctors delegated to perform
the autopsy should arrive, and the head keeper of the Morgue advised him
to possess himself with patience, and while he was waiting to look
around and see the latest cadavers which had been brought there.

"We have had, in eight days, a larger number of women than men, which is
rare. And these women were nearly all habitues of the public balls and
race tracks."

"And how can you tell that?"

"Because they have pretty feet."

Professor Morin arrived with a confrere, a young Pasteurian doctor, with
a singular mind, broad and receptive, and who passed among his
companions for a man fond of chimeras, a little retiring, however, and
giving over to making experiments and to vague dreams. Monsieur Morin
saluted M. Ginory and presented to him the young doctor, Erwin by name,
and said to the Magistrate that the house students had probably begun
the autopsy to gain time.

The body, stripped of its clothing, lay upon the dissecting table, and
three young men, in velvet skull caps, with aprons tied about their
waists, were standing about the corpse; they had already begun the
autopsy. The mortal wound looked redder than ever in the whiteness of
the naked body.

Bernardet glided into the room, trying to keep out of sight, listening
and looking, and, above everything, not losing sight of M. Ginory's
face. A face in which the look was keen, penetrating, sharp as a knife,
as he bent over the pale face of the murdered man, regarding it as
searchingly as the surgeons' scalpels were searching the wound and the
flesh. Among those men in their black clothes, some with bared heads, in
order to work better; others with hats on, the stretched-out corpse
seemed like a wax figure upon a marble slab. Bernardet thought of those
images which he had seen copied from Rembrandt's pictures--the poet with
the anatomical pincers and the shambles. The surgeons bent over the
body, their hands busy and their sciss