But, at the last moment, a telegram from the south of France announced that the maid-of-all-work who had nursed Massignac in his house at Toulouse, a few weeks before, now declared that her master's illness was feigned¹ and that Massignac had left the house on several occasions, each time carefully concealing³ his absence from all the neighbours. Now one of these absences synchronized⁴ with the murder of Noël Dorgeroux. The woman's accusation⁵ therefore obliged the authorities to reopen an enquiry which had already elicited⁶ so much presumptive evidence of Théodore Massignac's guilt⁷.

 

The upshot of these two pieces of news was that my uncle Dorgeroux's secret depended on chance, that it would be saved by an immediate⁸ purchase or lost for ever by Massignac's arrest. This alternative added still further to the anxious curiosity of the spectators, many of whom correctly believed that they were witnessing the last of the Meudon exhibitions. They discussed the articles in the papers and the proofs or objections accumulated for or against the theory. They said that Prévotelle, to whom Massignac was refusing admission to the amphitheatre, was preparing a whole series of experiments with the intention of proving the absolute accuracy of his theory, the simplest of which experiments consisted in erecting⁹ a scaffolding outside the Yard and setting up an intervening obstacle to

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