Caught In The Net

Caught In The Net

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Title: Caught In The Net
Author: Emile Gaboriau
Release Date: January, 2001 [EBook #2451] [Date Last Updated: July
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CAUGHT IN THE NET
by EMILE GABORIAU

CHAPTER I.
PUTTING ON THE SCREW.
The cold on the 8th of February, 186-, was more intense than the
Parisians had experienced during the whole of the severe winter which
had preceded it, for at twelve o'clock on that day Chevalier's
thermometer, so well known by the denizens of Paris, registered three
degrees below zero. The sky was overcast and full of threatening signs
of snow, while the moisture on the pavement and roads had frozen hard,
rendering traffic of all kinds exceedingly hazardous. The whole great
city wore an air of dreariness and desolation, for even when a thin crust
of ice covers the waters of the Seine, the mind involuntarily turns to
those who have neither food, shelter, nor fuel.
This bitterly cold day actually made the landlady of the Hotel de Perou,
though she was a hard, grasping woman of Auvergne, gave a thought to
the condition of her lodgers, and one quite different from her usual idea
of obtaining the maximum of rent for the minimum of accommodation.
"The cold," remarked she to her husband, who was busily engaged in
replenishing the stove with fuel, "is enough to frighten the wits out of a
Polar bear. In this kind of weather I always feel very anxious, for it was

during a winter like this that one of our lodgers hung himself, a trick
which cost us fifty francs, in good, honest money, besides giving us a
bad name in the neighborhood. The fact is, one never knows what
lodgers are capable of doing. You should go up to the top floor, and see
how they are getting on there."
"Pooh, pooh!" replied her husband, M. Loupins; "they will do well
enough."
"Is that really your opinion?"
"I know that I am right. Daddy Tantaine went out as soon as it was light,
and a short time afterward Paul Violaine came down. There is no one
upstairs now but little Rose, and I expect that she has been wise enough
to stick to her bed."
"Ah!" answered the landlady rather spitefully. "I have made up my
mind regarding that young lady some time ago; she is a sight too pretty
for this house, and so I tell you."
The Hotel de Perou stands in the Rue de la Hachette, not twenty steps
from the Place de Petit Pont; and no more cruelly sarcastic title could
ever have been conferred on a building. The extreme shabbiness of the
exterior of the house, the narrow, muddy street in which it stood, the
dingy windows covered with mud, and repaired with every variety of
patch,--all seemed to cry out to the passers by: "This is the chosen
abode of misery and destitution."
The observer might have fancied it a robbers' den, but he would have
been wrong; for the inhabitants were fairly honest. The Hotel de Perou
was one of those refuges, growing scarcer and more scarce every day,
where unhappy men and women, who had been worsted in the battle of
life, could find a shelter in return for the change remaining from the last
five-franc piece. They treat it as the shipwrecked mariner uses the rock
upon which he climbs from the whirl of the angry waters, and breathes
a deep sigh of relief as he collects his forces for a fresh effort. However
wretched existence may be, a protracted sojourn in such a shelter as the
Hotel de