Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his
dinner, and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These
were, however, reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the
old man with a scar, and a face almost as grey as his moustaches,
who always sat at a table in the entrance hall--a hall hung with
weapons. Valentin's house was perhaps as peculiar and celebrated
as its master. It was an old house, with high walls and tall
poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity--and
perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that
there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door,
which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large
and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the
garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world
outside; all round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with
special spikes at the top; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to
reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned
that he was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making
some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and
though these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always
performed them with precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of
criminals, he was very mild about their punishment. Since he had
been supreme over French--and largely over European--policial
methods, his great influence had been honourably used for the
mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons. He was
one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than
justice.