the portraits of
his wife and daughter, even as flowers might have been offered to their
memory.

About six o'clock, when Mathieu reached the works, he found the place
terrified by the catastrophe. Ever since the morning he had been
rendered anxious by Morange's letter, which had greatly surprised and
worried him with that extraordinary story of Alexandre turning up
once more, being welcomed by Constance, and introduced by her into the
establishment. Plain as was the greater part of the letter, it contained
some singularly incoherent passages, and darted from one point to
another with incomprehensible suddenness. Mathieu had read it three
times, indulging on each occasion in fresh hypotheses of a gloomier and
gloomier nature; for the more he reflected, the more did the affair
seem to him to be fraught with menace. Then, on reaching the rendezvous
appointed by Morange, he found himself in presence of those bleeding
bodies which Victor Moineaud had just picked up and laid out side by
side! Silent, chilled to his bones, Mathieu listened to his son, Denis,
who had hastened up to tell him of the unexplainable misfortune, the
two men falling one atop of the other, first the old mad accountant, and
then the young fellow whom nobody knew and who seemed to have dropped
from heaven.

Mathieu, for his part, had immediately recognized Alexandre, and if,
pale and terrified, he kept silent on the subject, it was because he
desired to take nobody, not even his son, into his confidence, given the
fresh suppositions, the frightful suppositions, which now arose in his
mind from out of all the darkness. He listened with growing anxiety to
the enumeration of the few points which were certain: the extinguishing
of the electric lights in the gallery and the opening of the balustrade
door, which was always kept closed and could only have been opened
by some habitue, since, to turn the handle, one had to press a secret
spring which kept it from moving. And, all at once, as Victor Moineaud
pointed out that the old man had certainly been the first to fall,
since one of the young man's legs had been stretched across his stomach,
Mathieu was carried fourteen years backward. He remembered old Moineaud
picking up Blaise on the very spot where Victor, the son, had just
picked up Morange and Alexandre. Blaise! At the thought of his dead boy
fresh light came to Mathieu, a frightful suspicion blazed up amid the
terrible obscurity in which he had been