The Père-Lachaise Mystery: 2nd Victor Legris Mystery. Claude Izner

while he lives you will never have to sleep in the open.’

      Reassured by this speech, he went back down the corridor leading to his bivouac. The curtain covering the entrance had been half torn down. He stopped on the threshold, dumbstruck by the devastation that had occurred in the room. The crates in which he kept his treasures were spread out over the floor in a trail of canes, hats and shoes. Someone had gone through them furiously, tearing them apart and trampling on them. The two chairs, one of them broken, lay on their backs next to a wall. The stove had been pulled from its iron pipe, and someone had crammed the carpet, rolled up in a cylinder, into the hole. As for the bed, it resembled a battlefield on which the disembowelled quilts were losing their entrails. But what disturbed Père Moscou the most was the realisation that three branches of his acacia had been broken. He raced to the end of the corridor, to what had once been the secretariat of the Conseil d’État, to make sure that his cart was still beneath the pile of firewood where he had hidden it the previous evening. Still there. But his relief was shortlived. Unable to face the devastation of his bivouac alone, he hastened to find Madame Valladier.