Next day the crime was common gossip, and the Abbe’s friends took counsel with him.  One there was astonished that the culprit remained undiscovered.  ‘But why should you marvel?’ said Bruneau.  ’I could kill you and your wife at your own chimney-corner without a soul knowing.  Had I taken to evil courses instead of to good I should have been a terrible assassin.’  There is a touch of the pride which De Quincey attributes to Williams in this boastfulness, and throughout the parallel is irresistible.  Williams, however, was the better dandy; he put on a dress-coat and patent-leather pumps because the dignity of his work demanded a fitting costume.  And Bruneau wore the grey suit not without a hope of disguise.  Yet you like to think that the Abbe looked complacently upon his valise, and had forethought for the cut of his professional coat; and if he be not in the first flight of artistry, remember his provincial upbringing, and furnish the proper excuse.

Meanwhile the scandal of the murdered widow passed into forgetfulness, and the Abbe was still impoverished.  Already he had robbed his vicar, and the suspicion of the Abbe Fricot led on to the final and the detected crime.  Now Fricot had noted the loss of money and of bonds, and though he refrained from exposure he had confessed to a knowledge of the criminal.  M. Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion, and he determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his peace.  On January 2, 1894, M. Fricot returned to supper after administering the extreme unction to a parishioner.  While the meal was preparing, he went into his garden in sabots and bareheaded, and never again was seen alive.  The supper cooled, the vicar was still absent; the murderer, hungry with his toil, ate not only his own, but his victim’s share of the food, grimly hinting that Fricot would not come back.  Suicide was dreamed of, murder hinted; up and down the village was the search made, and none was more zealous than the distressed curate.

At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well, and before long blood-stains revealed themselves on the masonry.  Speedily was the body recovered, disfigured and battered beyond recognition, and the voice of the village went up in denunciation of the Abbe Bruneau.  Immunity had made the culprit callous, and in a few hours suspicion became certainty.  A bleeding nose was the lame explanation given for the stains which were on his clothes, on the table, on the keys of his harmonium.  A quaint and characteristic folly was it that drove the murderer straight to the solace of his religion.  You picture him, hot and red-handed from murder, soothing his battered conscience with some devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from its broken body, and leaving upon the harmonium the ineradicable traces of his guilt.  Thus he lived, poised between murder and the Church, spending upon the vulgar dissipation of a Breton village the blood and money of his foolish victims.  But for him ‘les tavernes et les filles’ of Laval meant a veritable paradise, and his sojourn in the country is proof enough of a limited cunning.  Had he been more richly endowed, Paris had been the theatre of his crimes.  As it is, he goes down to posterity as the Man in the Grey Suit, and the best friend the cabmen of Laval ever knew.  Them, indeed, he left inconsolable.