Mathieu, for his part, had immediately recognized Alexandre, and if, pale and terrified, he kept silent on the subject, it was because he desired to take nobody, not even his son, into his confidence, given the fresh suppositions, the frightful suppositions, which now arose in his mind from out of all the darkness.  He listened with growing anxiety to the enumeration of the few points which were certain:  the extinguishing of the electric lights in the gallery and the opening of the balustrade door, which was always kept closed and could only have been opened by some habitue, since, to turn the handle, one had to press a secret spring which kept it from moving.  And, all at once, as Victor Moineaud pointed out that the old man had certainly been the first to fall, since one of the young man’s legs had been stretched across his stomach, Mathieu was carried fourteen years backward.  He remembered old Moineaud picking up Blaise on the very spot where Victor, the son, had just picked up Morange and Alexandre.  Blaise!  At the thought of his dead boy fresh light came to Mathieu, a frightful suspicion blazed up amid the terrible obscurity in which he had been groping and doubting.  And, thereupon, leaving Denis to settle everything down below, he decided to see Constance.

Up above, however, when Mathieu was on the point of turning into the communicating passage, he paused once more, this time near the lift.  It was there, fourteen years previously, that Morange, finding the trap open, had gone down to warn and chide the workmen, while Constance, according to her own account, had quietly returned into the house, at the very moment when Blaise, coming from the other end of the dim gallery, plunged into the gulf.  Everybody had eventually accepted that narrative as being accurate, but Mathieu now felt that it was mendacious.  He could recall various glances, various words, various spells of silence; and sudden certainty came upon him, a certainty based on all the petty things which he had not then understood, but which now assumed the most frightful significance.  Yes, it was certain, even though round it there hovered the monstrous vagueness of silent crimes, cowardly crimes, over which a shadow of horrible mystery always lurks.  Moreover, it explained the sequel, those two bodies lying below, as far, that is, as logical reasoning can explain a madman’s action with all its gaps and mysteriousness.  Nevertheless, Mathieu still strove to doubt; before anything else he wished to see Constance.

Showing a waxy pallor, she had remained erect, motionless, in the middle of her little drawing-room.  The waiting of fourteen years previously had begun once more, lasting on and on, and filling her with such anxiety that she held her breath the better to listen.  Nothing, no stir, no sound of footsteps, had yet ascended from the works.  What could be happening then?  Was the hateful thing, the dreaded thing, merely a nightmare after all?  Yet Morange had really sneered in her face, she had fully understood him.  Had not a howl, the thud of a fall, just reached her ears?  And now, had not the rumbling of the machinery ceased?  It was death, the factory silent, chilled and lost for her.  All at once her heart ceased beating as she detected a sound of footsteps drawing nearer and nearer with increased rapidity.  The door opened, and it was Mathieu who came in.