“But surely, at your service, Chief,” replied the old man, obsequiously.  “If the gentlemen will give themselves the trouble to enter the office, I will lead them behind, direct into the mortuary chamber.  There are many people in yonder.”

It was the usual crowd of sightseers passing slowly before the plate glass of this, the most terrible shop-front in the world, where the goods exposed, the merchandise, are hideous corpses laid out in rows upon the marble slabs, the battered, tattered remnants of outraged humanity, insulted by the most terrible indignities in death.

Who make up this curious throng, and what strange morbid motives drag them there?  Those fat, comfortable-looking women, with their baskets on their arms; the decent workmen in dusty blouses, idling between the hours of work; the riffraff of the streets, male or female, in various stages of wretchedness and degradation?  A few, no doubt, are impelled by motives we cannot challenge—­they are torn and tortured by suspense, trembling lest they may recognize missing dear ones among the exposed; others stare carelessly at the day’s “take,” wondering, perhaps, if they may come to the same fate; one or two are idle sightseers, not always French, for the Morgue is a favourite haunt with the irrepressible tourist doing Paris.  Strangest of all, the murderer himself, the doer of the fell deed, comes here, to the very spot where his victim lies stark and reproachful, and stares at it spellbound, fascinated, filled more with remorse, perchance, than fear at the risk he runs.  So common is this trait, that in mysterious murder cases the police of Paris keep a disguised officer among the crowd at the Morgue, and have thereby made many memorable arrests.

“This way, gentlemen, this way;” and the keeper of the Morgue led the party through one or two rooms into the inner and back recesses of the buildings.  It was behind the scenes of the Morgue, and they were made free of its most gruesome secrets as they passed along.

The temperature had suddenly fallen far below freezing-point, and the icy cold chilled to the very marrow.  Still worse was an all-pervading, acrid odour of artificially suspended animal decay.  The cold-air process, that latest of scientific contrivances to arrest the waste of tissue, has now been applied at the Morgue to preserve and keep the bodies fresh, and allow them to be for a longer time exposed than when running water was the only aid.  There are, moreover, many specially contrived refrigerating chests, in which those still unrecognized corpses are laid by for months, to be dragged out, if needs be, like carcasses of meat.

“What a loathsome place!” cried Sir Charles.  “Hurry up, Jack! let us get out of this, in Heaven’s name!”

“Where’s my man?” quickly asked Colonel Papillon in response to this appeal.

“There, the third from the left,” whispered M. Flocon.  “We hoped you would recognize the corpse at once.”