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group of people in the Duravel box succeeded in bearing the dowager to a lobby. There strong convulsive fits seized her; and after in vain trying all the means of recovery, which the ability of half a dozen of the first Parisian physicians who chanced to be amongst the audience could suggest, she was carried to her hotel . . . . Directly the stiff fingers of the prostrate woman released it, a gentleman, whose curiosity overmastered his fears, picked up and examined the fatal fan. Its handle was ivory, of curious workmanship, and on it was a picture of an Italian-looking bath-house in a garden. Beneath the landscape were inscribed the initials “C. D.,” and the date “October 18th, 1810.” There was nothing about the gift, apparently to excite the extraordinary emotion which it had been the means of evoking!
All Paris next morning was busy with various versions of the accident to the autocrat of the fashionable world. As twenty years before in Havre, rumour, romance, and exaggeration, fastened themselves on the name of Duravel. Some said the veteran coquette had fainted at the sight of an old lover. Some attached themselves to the first theory of a mysterious poison, and saw in the affair a tragedy worthy of Brinvilliers or Borgia. Others hinted that the celebrated gambler had been arrested for debt. These and a dozen other fictions occupied the salons during the mornings, but, about noon, truth began to rise to the surface from the bottom of the well, and it became known that the gentleman with the harsh voice—the giver of the fan—was an officer of justice acting under instructions, and that Madame Corisande Duravel, who had partially recovered her senses, was, at that moment, under examination at the Bureau of the superintendent of police, and that the charge against her was murder!
The sequel must be stated in a few words. The day before the scene at the Grand Opera a poor man miserably dressed and apparently worn out with a long journey on foot arrived at a low cabaret in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He engaged a bed for a few sous. In the night he was taken dangerously ill, and raved in such a wild and incoherent manner that the other lodgers demanded that he should be turned out. The landlady, however, was more humane, and sent for a priest. There was some delay in procuring one, and in the meantime an officer of police called at the cabaret to see after some other lodger. The person he wanted was hiding in the same room as the delirious man, and the officer when engaged in securing the one overheard the outcries of the other. He was struck by some few words which the poor wretch repeated over and over again, especially by his mention of a fan which he wanted to present to Madame Duravel, for the name of the Dowager had been mixed up with more than one plot, and she was herself, though perfectly unconscious of it, under strict surveillance. Though the ravings of the old man were vague and contradictory in the extreme, the practised detective contrived to elicit that it was the dearest wish of the dying man’s heart to present the fan
