The next day all Paris buzzed and wondered about this Ansonia affair, as it was called.  The newspapers printed long accounts of it with elaborate details, and various conjectures were made as to the disappearance of Martinez’s fair companion.  More or less plausible theories were also put forth touching the arrested American, prudently referred to as “Monsieur K., a well-known New Yorker.”  It was furthermore dwelt upon as significant that the famous detective, Paul Coquenil, had returned to his old place on the force for the especial purpose of working on this case.  And M. Coquenil was reported to have already, by one of his brilliant strokes, secured a clew that would lead shortly to important revelations.  Alas, no one knew under what distressing circumstances this precious clew had been lost!

Shortly before nine by the white clock over the columned entrance to the Palais de Justice, M. Paul passed through the great iron and gilt barrier that fronts the street and turning to the left, mounted the wide stone stairway.  He had had his snatch of sleep at the haman, his rubdown and cold plunge, but not his intended bout with the wrestling professional.  He had had wrestling enough for one day, and now he had come to keep his appointment with Judge Hauteville.

Two flights up the detective found himself in a spacious corridor off which opened seven doors leading to the offices of seven judges.  Seven!  Strange this resemblance to the fatal corridor at the Ansonia!  And stranger still that Judge Hauteville’s office should be Number Six!

Coquenil moved on past palace guards in bright apparel, past sad-faced witnesses and brisk lawyers of the court in black robes with amusing white bibs at their throats.  And presently he entered Judge Hauteville’s private room, where an amiable greffier asked him to sit down until the judge should arrive.

There was nothing in the plain and rather businesslike furnishings of this room to suggest the somber and sordid scenes daily enacted here.  On the dull leather of a long table, covered with its usual litter of papers, had been spread the criminal facts of a generation, the sinister harvest of ignorance and vice and poverty.  On these battered chairs had sat and twisted hundreds of poor wretches, innocent and guilty, petty thieves, shifty-eyed scoundrels, dull brutes of murderers, and occasionally a criminal of a higher class, summoned for the preliminary examinations.  Here, under the eye of a bored guard, they had passed miserable hours while the judge, smiling or frowning, hands in his pockets, strode back and forth over the shabby red-and-green carpet putting endless questions, sifting out truth from falsehood, struggling against stupidity and cunning, studying each new case as a separate problem with infinite tact and insight, never wearying, never losing his temper, coming back again and again to the essential point until more than one stubborn criminal had broken down and, from sheer exhaustion, confessed, like the assassin who finally blurted out:  “Well, yes, I did it.  I’d rather be guillotined than bothered like this.”