Morange quietly stepped into the void, amid the darkness.  And, without a cry, he fell.  Alexandre who was close in the rear, almost touching him so as not to lose him, certainly detected the void and the gust which followed the fall, as with sudden horror the flooring failed beneath them; but force of motion carried him on, he stepped forward in his turn, howled and likewise fell, head over heels.  Both were smashed below, both killed at once.  True, Morange still breathed for a few seconds.  Alexandre, for his part, lay with his skull broken to pieces and his brains scattered on the very spot where Blaise had been picked up.

Horrible was the stupefaction when those bodies were found there.  Nobody could explain the catastrophe.  Morange carried off his secret, the reason for that savage act of justice which he had accomplished according to the chance suggestions of his dementia.  Perhaps he had wished to punish Constance, perhaps he had desired to repair the old wrong:  Denis long since stricken in the person of his brother, and now saved for the sake of his daughter Hortense, who would live happily with Margot, the pretty doll who was so good.  By suppressing the criminal instrument the old accountant had indeed averted the possibility of a fresh crime.  Swayed by his fixed idea, however, he had doubtless never reasoned that cataclysmic deed of justice, which was above reason, and which passed by with the impassive savagery of a death-dealing hurricane.

At the works there was but one opinion, Morange had assuredly been mad; and he alone could have caused the accident, particularly as it was impossible to account, otherwise than by an act of madness, for the extinguishing of the lights, the opening of the balustrade-door, and the plunge into the cavity which he knew to be there, and into which had followed him the unfortunate young man his companion.  Moreover, the accountant’s madness was no longer doubted by anybody a few days later, when the doorkeeper of his house related his final eccentricities, and a commissary of police went to search his rooms.  He had been mad, mad enough to be placed in confinement.

To begin, nobody had ever seen a flat in such an extraordinary condition, the kitchen a perfect stable, the drawing-room in a state of utter abandonment with its Louis XIV. furniture gray with dust, and the dining-room all topsy-turvy, the old oak tables and chairs being piled up against the window as if to shut out every ray of light, though nobody could tell why.  The only properly kept room was that in which Reine had formerly slept, which was as clean as a sanctuary, with its pitch-pine furniture as bright as if it had been polished every day.  But the apartment in which Morange’s madness became unmistakably manifest was his own bedchamber, which he had turned into a museum of souvenirs, covering its walls with photographs of his wife and daughter.  Above a table there, the wall facing the window quite