The Baron of Nucingen, on recognizing the evidence of poison, and failing to find his seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, imagined that one of two persons whom he greatly disliked—­either Paccard or Europe—­was guilty of the crime.  In his first impulse of rage he flew to the prefecture of police.  This was a stroke of a bell that called up all Corentin’s men.  The officials of the prefecture, the legal profession, the chief of the police, the justice of the peace, the examining judge,—­all were astir.  By nine in the evening three medical men were called in to perform an autopsy on poor Esther, and inquiries were set on foot.

Trompe-la-Mort, warned by Asie, exclaimed: 

“No one knows that I am here; I may take an airing.”  He pulled himself up by the skylight of his garret, and with marvelous agility was standing in an instant on the roof, whence he surveyed the surroundings with the coolness of a tiler.

“Good!” said he, discerning a garden five houses off in the Rue de Provence, “that will just do for me.”

“You are paid out, Trompe-la-Mort,” said Contenson, suddenly emerging from behind a stack of chimneys.  “You may explain to Monsieur Camusot what mass you were performing on the roof, Monsieur l’Abbe, and, above all, why you were escaping——­”

“I have enemies in Spain,” said Carlos Herrera.

“We can go there by way of your attic,” said Contenson.

The sham Spaniard pretended to yield; but, having set his back and feet across the opening of the skylight, he gripped Contenson and flung him off with such violence that the spy fell in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Georges.

Contenson was dead on his field of honor; Jacques Collin quietly dropped into the room again and went to bed.

“Give me something that will make me very sick without killing me,” said he to Asie; “for I must be at death’s door, to avoid answering inquisitive persons.  I have just got rid of a man in the most natural way, who might have unmasked me.”

At seven o’clock on the previous evening Lucien had set out in his own chaise to post to Fontainebleau with a passport he had procured in the morning; he slept in the nearest inn on the Nemours side.  At six in the morning he went alone, and on foot, through the forest as far as Bouron.

“This,” said he to himself, as he sat down on one of the rocks that command the fine landscape of Bouron, “is the fatal spot where Napoleon dreamed of making a final tremendous effort on the eve of his abdication.”

At daybreak he heard the approach of post-horses and saw a britska drive past, in which sat the servants of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu and Clotilde de Grandlieu’s maid.

“Here they are!” thought Lucien.  “Now, to play the farce well, and I shall be saved!—­the Duc de Grandlieu’s son-in-law in spite of him!”

It was an hour later when he heard the peculiar sound made by a superior traveling carriage, as the berline came near in which two ladies were sitting.  They had given orders that the drag should be put on for the hill down to Bouron, and the man-servant behind the carriage had it stopped.