clamour, and most especially weary of never getting any rent without a
fight for it, gave him notice to quit. Derues removed to the rue
Beaubourg, where he continued to act as commission agent under the name
of Cyrano Derues de Bury.

And now we will concern ourselves no more with the unravelling of this
tissue of imposition; we will wander no longer in this labyrinth of
fraud, of low and vile intrigue, of dark crime of which the clue
disappears in the night, and of which the trace is lost in a doubtful
mixture of blood and mire; we will listen no longer to the cry of the
widow and her four children reduced to beggary, to the groans of obscure
victims, to the cries of terror and the death-groan which echoed one
night through the vaults of a country house near Beauvais. Behold other
victims whose cries are yet louder, behold yet other crimes and a
punishment which equals them in terror! Let these nameless ghosts, these
silent spectres, lose themselves in the clear daylight which now appears,
and make room for other phantoms which rend their shrouds and issue from
the tomb demanding vengeance.

Derues was now soon to have a chance of obtaining immortality. Hitherto
his blows had been struck by chance, henceforth he uses all the resources
of his infernal imagination; he concentrates all his strength on one
point--conceives and executes his crowning piece of wickedness. He
employs for two years all his science as cheat, forger, and poisoner in
extending the net which was to entangle a whole family; and, taken in his
own snare, he struggles in vain; in vain does he seek to gnaw through the
meshes which confine him. The foot placed on the last rung of this
ladder of crime, stands also on the first step by which he mounts the
scaffold.