“We can yet save ourselves!” exclaimed surgeon, with a sudden flash of inspiration.

Rushing into the room where the pretended chevalier was lying, he called out—­

“The police are coming up!  If they discover your sex you are lost, and so am I. Do as I tell you.”

At a sign from him, La Constantin went down and opened the door.  While the rooms on the first floor were being searched, Perregaud made with a lancet a superficial incision in the chevalier’s right arm, which gave very little pain, and bore a close resemblance to a sword-cut.  Surgery and medicine were at that time so inextricably involved, required such apparatus, and bristled with such scientific absurdities, that no astonishment was excited by the extraordinary collection of instruments which loaded the tables and covered the floors below:  even the titles of certain treatises which there had been no time to destroy, awoke no suspicion.

Fortunately for the surgeon and his accomplice, they had only one patient—­the chevalier—­in their house when the descent was made.  When the chevalier’s room was reached, the first thing which the officers of the law remarked were the hat, spurred boots, and sword of the patient.  Claude Perregaud hardly looked up as the room was invaded; he only made a sign to those—­who came in to be quiet, and went on dressing the wound.  Completely taken in, the officer in command merely asked the name of the patient and the cause of the wound.  La Constantin replied that it’ was the young Chevalier de Moranges, nephew of Commander de Jars, who had had an affair of honour that same night, and being sightly wounded had been brought thither by his uncle hardly an hour before.  These questions and the apparently trustworthy replies elicited by them being duly taken down, the uninvited visitors retired, having discovered nothing to justify their visit.

All might have been well had there been nothing the matter but the wound on the chevalier’s sword-arm.  But at the moment when Perregaud gave it to him the poisonous nostrums employed by La Constantin were already working in his blood.  Violent fever ensued, and in three days the chevalier was dead.  It was his funeral which had met Quennebert’s wedding party at the church door.

Everything turned out as Quennebert had anticipated.  Madame Quennebert, furious at the deceit which had been practised on her, refused to listen to her husband’s justification, and Trumeau, not letting the grass grow under his feet, hastened the next day to launch an accusation of bigamy against the notary; for the paper which had been found in the nuptial camber was nothing less than an attested copy of a contract of marriage concluded between Quennebert and Josephine-Charlotte Boullenois.  It was by the merest chance that Trumeau had come on the record of the marriage, and he now challenged his rival to produce a certificate of the death of his first wife.  Charlotte Boullenois,