Yes, conspiracy! for the very next day, when I was once more hailed before the juge d’instruction, another confrontation awaited me:  this time with that scurvy rogue Theodore.  He had been suborned by M. le Marquis to turn against the hand that fed him.  What price he was paid for this Judas trick I shall never know, and all that I do know is that he actually swore before the juge d’instruction that M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour called at my office in the late forenoon of the tenth of October; that I then ordered him—­Theodore—­to go out to get his dinner first, and then to go all the way over to Neuilly with a message to someone who turned out to be non-existent.  He went on to assert that when he returned at six o’clock in the afternoon he found the office door locked, and I—­his employer—­presumably gone.  This at first greatly upset him, because he was supposed to sleep on the premises, but seeing that there was nothing for it but to accept the inevitable, he went round to his mother’s rooms at the back of the fish-market and remained there ever since, waiting to hear from me.

That, Sir, was the tissue of lies which that jailbird had concocted for my undoing, knowing well that I could not disprove them because it had been my task on that eventful morning to keep an eye on M. le Marquis whilst he went to the Mont de Piete first, and then to mm.  Raynal Freres, the bankers where he deposited the money.  For this purpose I had been obliged to don a disguise, which I had not discarded till later in the day, and thus was unable to disprove satisfactorily the monstrous lies told by that perjurer.

Ah!  I can see that sympathy for my unmerited misfortunes has filled your eyes with tears.  No doubt in your heart you feel that my situation at that hour was indeed desperate, and that I—­Hector Ratichon, the confidant of kings, the benefactor of the oppressed—­did spend the next few years of my life in a penal settlement, where those arch-malefactors themselves should have been.  But no, Sir!  Fate may be a fickle jade, rogues may appear triumphant, but not for long, Sir, not for long!  It is brains that conquer in the end . . . brains backed by righteousness and by justice.

Whether I had actually foreseen the treachery of those two rattlesnakes, or whether my habitual caution and acumen alone prompted me to take those measures of precaution of which I am about to tell you, I cannot truthfully remember.  Certain it is that I did take those precautions which ultimately proved to be the means of compensating me for most that I had suffered.

It had been a part of the original plan that, on the day immediately following the tenth of October, I, in my own capacity as Hector Ratichon, who had been absent from my office for twenty-four hours, would arrive there in the morning, find the place locked, force an entrance into the apartment, and there find M. le Marquis in his pitiable plight.  After which I would, of course, immediately notify the police of the mysterious occurrence.