“I’ve never heard the name of the Château Paradou in my life,” he replied.
“It is strange,” she said in a low voice, “but in the summer I saw in the garden a man with an ear like that—I have called him since by Edmond About’s title, ‘L’Homme à l’Oreille Cassée.’ He was a dreadful man—hairy and fierce and ragged. Do you know, Patignon, that you very much resemble that man? It was that man with the broken ear I was watching at the trente-et-quarante table.”
Taking his courage and his face in both hands, he bent across the table confronting her.
“And if it were I—what then?”
She sat motionless. “It would be a strange coincidence. You, the great painter whom I loved as a young girl, to be a common assassin—a robber of my husband.”
He shifted his position, and mechanically drained one of t
