Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/230

 To have brought Court to an acknowledgment of his crime, and to obtain from him a written declaration of it, was no doubt an important point gained; but a more difficult battle remained to be fought ere Raoul could be persuaded to follow his example. To effect this, I stole softly to the room in which he was confined. He was sleeping; and, stepping cautiously in the fear of awaking him, I placed myself beside him, and whispered gently in his ear, in the hope of leading him, as under the influence of a dream, to answer the questions thus put to him. Without raising the low tone in which I had first addressed him, I interrogated him as to the particulars of the murder. Some unintelligible words escaped him, but it was impossible to make any sense of them. This scene lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour, when, at my asking him "What became of the knife with which you murdered your victim?" he gave a sudden start, uttered some inarticulate sounds, and, flinging himself from the bed on which he was lying, opened his wild and glaring eyes full upon me, as if he dreaded the apparition of some horrid vision.

From the terror and astonishment with which he continued to regard me, even after he had recognised my person, it might easily be perceived that he dreaded my having been the witness to his late severe internal struggle, and I could readily see in his eyes the eagerness with which he sought to divine how far his restless guilty conscience had betrayed him during his unquiet slumbers. A cold perspiration covered his face, he was deathly pale, and whilst he endeavoured to force a smile, his teeth chattered and ground together in spite of him; he presented an exact representation of a damned spirit in all the tortures of an agonizing conscience—a second Orestes pursued by the furies. Ere the last vapours of his uneasy dreams had passed away, I wished to turn the circumstance to account; it was not the first time I had called the night-mare to my aid.