six o’clock
Now , a singular circumstance went far to prove the hour at which the crime was committed . In the terror Jeanne Malassis must have felt on hearing her master 's cries , she knocked over , as she rose , the table at her bedside , on which lay her watch , the only present the miser had given her in five years . The mainspring was broken by the shock , and the hands had stopped at two in the morning . By the middle of March -LRB- the date of the murder -RRB- daylight dawns between five and six o'clock . To whatever distance the gold had been carried , Tascheron could not possibly , under any apparent hypothesis , have transported it alone . The care with which some of the footsteps were effaced , while others , to which Tascheron 's shoes fitted , remained , certainly pointed to some mysterious assistant . Forced into hypotheses , the authorities once more attributed the crime to a desperate passion ; not finding any trace of the object of such a passion in the lower classes , they began to look higher .