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“And the one before–the old one–what does he think?” I asked this question with one of those cold, hollow, heartless laughs, such as croupiers are supposed to indulge in when they toss a five-franc piece back to a poor devil who has just lost his last hundred Napoleons at baccarat–I have never seen this done and have never heard the laugh, but that is the way the storybooks put it–particularly the blood-curdling part of the laugh.

“You mean Pierre Channet, the painter, Monsieur?”

I had, of course, never heard of Pierre Channet, the painter, in my life, but I nodded as knowingly as if I had been on the most intimate relations with him for years. Then, again, this was my only way of getting down to his personal level, the only way I could draw him out and get at his real character. By taking his side of the question, he would unbosom himself the more freely, and, perhaps, incidentally, some of the peccadilloes–some of the most wicked.

“He will not think, Monsieur. They pulled him out of the river last month.”

“Drowned?”

His answer gave me a little start, but I did not betray myself.

“So they said. The water trickled along his nose for two days as he lay on the slab, before they found out who he was.”

“In the morgue?” I inquired in a tone of surprise. I spoke as if this part of the story had not reached me.

“In the morgue, Monsieur.”

The repeated words came as cold and merciless as the drops of water that fell on poor Channet as he lay under the gas-jets.

“Drowned himself for love of Mademoiselle Beraud, you say?”

“Quite true, Monsieur. He is not the only one. I know four.”

“And she began to love another in a week?” My indignation nearly got the better of me this time, but I do not think he noticed it.

“Why not, Monsieur? One must live.”

As he spoke he moved an ash-tray deliberately within reach of my hand, and poured the balance of the St. Julien into my glass without a quiver.

I smoked on in silence. Every spark of human feeling had evidently been stifled in him. The Juggernaut of Paris, in rolling over him, had broken every generous impulse, flattening him into a pulp of brutal selfishness. That is why his face was so smooth and cold, his eyes so dull and his voice so monotonous. I understood it all now. I changed the subject. I did not know where it would lead if I kept on. Drowned lovers were not what I was looking for.

“You say you have only been two years in Suresne?” I resumed, carelessly, flicking the ashes from my cigar.

“But two years, Monsieur.”

“Why did you leave Paris?”

“Ah, when one is over fifty it is quite done. Is it not so, Monsieur?”–this made with a little deferential wave of his hand. I noted the tribute to the staid painter, and nodded approvingly. He was evidently climbing up to my level. Perhaps this plank, slender as it was, might take him out of the slough and land him on higher and better ground.

“Yes, you are right. And so you came to Suresne to be quiet.”

“Not altogether, Monsieur. I came to be near–Well! we are never too old for that–Is it not so?” He said it quite simply, quite as a matter of course, the tones of his voice as monotonous as any he had yet used–just as he had spoken of poor Channet in the morgue with the water trickling over his dead face.

“Oh, then, even at fifty you have a sweetheart!” I blurted out with a sudden twist of my probe. I felt now that I might as well follow the iniquity to the end.

“It is true, Monsieur.”

“Is she pretty?” As long as I was dissecting I might at least discover the root of the disease. This remark, however, was not addressed to his face, but to a crumb of ashes on the cloth, which I was trying to remove with the point of a knife. He might not have answered, or liked it, had I fired the question at him point-blank.