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Page 64
The company is the most aristocratic and wealthy in Paris.
Three or four brass bands are playing behind a portiere between the coal
shed, and also behind time. Footmen in gay-laced livery bring in beer
noiselessly and carry out apple-peelings dropped by the guests.
Valerie, seventh Duchess du Bellairs, leans back on a solid gold ottoman
on eiderdown cushions, surrounded by the wittiest, the bravest, and the
handsomest courtiers in the capital.
"Ah, madame," said the Prince Champvilliers, of Palms Royale, corner of
Seventy-third Street, "as Montesquiaux says, 'Rien de plus bon tutti
frutti'--Youth seems your inheritance. You are to-night the most
beautiful, the wittiest in your own salon. I can scarce believe my own
senses, when I remember that thirty-one years ago you--"
"Saw it off!" says the Duchess peremptorily.
The Prince bows low, and drawing a jewelled dagger, stabs himself to the
heart.
"The displeasure of your grace is worse than death," he says, as he
takes his overcoat and hat from a corner of the mantelpiece and leaves
the room.
"Voila," says Beebe Francillon, fanning herself languidly. "That is the
way with men. Flatter them, and they kiss your hand. Loose but a moment
the silken leash that holds them captive through their vanity and
self-opinionativeness, and the son-of-a-gun gets on his ear at once. The
devil go with him, I say."
"Ah, mon Princesse," sighs the Count Pumpernickel, stooping and
whispering with eloquent eyes into her ear. "You are too hard upon us.
Balzac says, 'All women are not to themselves what no one else is to
another.' Do you not agree with him?"
"Cheese it!" says the Princess. "Philosophy palls upon me. I'll shake
you."
"Hosses?" says the Count.
Arm and arm they go out to the salon au Beurre.
Armande de Fleury, the young pianissimo danseuse from the Folies Bergere
is about to sing.
She slightly clears her throat and lays a voluptuous cud of chewing gum
upon the piano as the first notes of the accompaniment ring through the
salon.
As she prepares to sing, the Duchess du Bellairs grasps the arm of her
ottoman in a vice-like grip, and she watches with an expression of
almost anguished suspense.
She scarcely breathes.
Then, as Armande de Fleury, before uttering a note, reels, wavers, turns
white as snow and falls dead upon the floor, the Duchess breathes a sigh
of relief.
The Duchess had poisoned her.
Then the guests crowd about the piano, gazing with bated breath, and
shuddering as they look upon the music rack and observe that the song
that Armande came so near singing is "Sweet Marie."
Twenty minutes later a dark and muffled figure was seen to emerge from a
recess in the mullioned wall of the Arc de Triomphe and pass rapidly
northward.
It was no other than Tictocq, the detective.
The network of evidence was fast being drawn about the murderer of Marie
Cusheau.
. . . . . .
It is midnight on the steeple of the Cathedral of Notadam.
It is also the same time at other given points in the vicinity.
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