As she placed the soup before the guest, who changed his attitude to a
sitting one, he looked her full in the face, and his moustache went up
under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.
'Well!' said the previous speaker, 'let us come back to our subject.
Leaving all that aside, gentlemen, it was because the man was acquitted
on his trial that people said at Marseilles that the devil was let
loose. That was how the phrase began to circulate, and what it meant;
nothing more.' 'How do they call him?' said the landlady. 'Biraud, is it not?' 'Rigaud, madame,' returned the tall Swiss. 'Rigaud! To be sure.'
The traveller's soup was succeeded by a dish of meat, and that by a dish
of vegetables. He ate all that was placed before him, emptied his bottle
of wine, called for a glass of rum, and smoked his cigarette with
his cup of coffee. As he became refreshed, he became overbearing; and
patronised the company at the Daybreak in certain small talk at which he
assisted, as if his condition were far above his appearance.
The company might have had other engagements, or they might have felt
their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees, and not
being replaced by other company, left their new patron in possession of
the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in his kitchen; the
landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed traveller sat smoking
by the stove, warming his ragged feet. 'Pardon me, madame--that Biraud.' 'Rigaud, monsieur.' 'Rigaud. Pardon me again--has contracted your displeasure, how?'
The landlady, who had been at one moment thinking within herself that
this was a handsome man, at another moment that this was an ill-looking
man, observed the nose coming down and the moustache going up, and
strongly inclined to the latter decision. Rigaud was a criminal, she
said, who had killed his wife. 'Ay, ay? Death of my life, that's a criminal indeed. But how do you know
it?' 'All the world knows it.' 'Hah! And yet he escaped justice?'
'Monsieur, the law could not prove it against him to its satisfaction.
So the law says. Nevertheless, all the world knows he did it. The people
knew it so well, that they tried to tear him to pieces.'
'Being all in perfect accord with their own wives?' said the guest. 'Haha!'
The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt almost
confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though, and he
turned it with a great show. She began once more to think that he was
not ill-looking after all.