After which Leroux drew his chair closer to my desk.

“Listen, then,” he said.  “You know the firm of Fournier Freres, in the Rue Colbert?”

“By name, of course.  Cutlers and surgical instrument makers by appointment to His Majesty.  What about them?”

“M. le Duc has had his eyes on them for some time.”

“Fournier Freres!” I ejaculated.  “Impossible!  A more reputable firm does not exist in France.”

“I know, I know,” he rejoined impatiently.  “And yet it is a curious fact that M. Aristide Fournier, the junior partner, has lately bought for himself a house at St. Claude.”

“At St. Claude?” I ejaculated.

“Yes,” he responded dryly.  “Very near to Gex, what?”

I shrugged my shoulders, for indeed the circumstances did appear somewhat strange.

Do you know Gex, my dear Sir?  Ah, it is a curious and romantic spot.  It has possibilities, both natural and political, which appear to have been expressly devised for the benefit of the smuggling fraternity.  Nestling in the midst of the Jura mountains, it is outside the customs zone of the Empire.  So you see the possibilities, do you not?  Gex soon became the picturesque warehouse of every conceivable kind of contraband goods.  On one side of it there was the Swiss frontier, and the Swiss Government was always willing to close one eye in the matter of customs provided its palm was sufficiently greased by the light-fingered gentry.  No difficulty, therefore, as you see, in getting contraband goods—­even English ones—­as far as Gex.

Here they could be kept hidden until a fitting opportunity occurred for smuggling them into France, opportunities for which the Jura, with their narrow defiles and difficult mountain paths, afforded magnificent scope.  St. Claude, of which Leroux had just spoken as the place where M. Aristide Fournier had recently bought himself a house, is in France, only a few kilometres from the neutral zone of Gex.  It seemed a strange spot to choose for a wealthy and fashionable member of Parisian bourgeois society, I was bound to admit.

“But,” I mused, “one cannot go to Gex without a permit from the police.”

“Not by road,” Leroux assented.  “But you will own that there are means available to men who are young and vigorous like M. Fournier, who moreover, I understand, is an accomplished mountaineer.  You know Gex, of course?”

I had crossed the Jura once, in my youth, but was not very intimately familiar with the district.  Leroux had a carefully drawn-out map of it in his pocket; this he laid out before me.