Thence I was laid in a warm bed,
the window of the room being open. These simple measures restored me in
about three hours; I should otherwise, probably, have continued under
the spell for nearly seven.
The practices of these nefarious conspirators had been carried on with
consummate skill and secrecy. Their dupes were led, as I was, to be
themselves auxiliary to the mystery which made their own destruction
both safe and certain.
A search was, of course, instituted. Graves were opened in Pere la
Chaise. The bodies exhumed had lain there too long, and were too much
decomposed to be recognized. One only was identified. The notice for the
burial, in this particular case, had been signed, the order given, and
the fees paid, by Gabriel Gaillarde, who was known to the official
clerk, who had to transact with him this little funereal business. The
very trick that had been arranged for me, had been successfully
practiced in his case. The person for whom the grave had been ordered,
was purely fictitious; and Gabriel Gaillarde himself filled the coffin,
on the cover of which that false name was inscribed as well as upon a
tomb-stone over the grave. Possibly the same honor, under my pseudonym,
may have been intended for me.
The identification was curious. This Gabriel Gaillarde had had a bad
fall from a runaway horse about five years before his mysterious
disappearance.
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