six o'clock in the afternoon
for the very next day , when I was once more hailed before the juge d'instruction , another confrontation awaited me : this time with that scurvy rogue Theodore . He had been suborned by M. le Marquis to turn against the hand that fed him . What price he was paid for this Judas trick I shall never know , and all that I do know is that he actually swore before the juge d'instruction that M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour called at my office in the late forenoon of the tenth of October ; that I then ordered him -- Theodore -- to go out to get his dinner first , and then to go all the way over to Neuilly with a message to someone who turned out to be non-existent . He went on to assert that when he returned at six o'clock in the afternoon he found the office door locked , and I -- his employer -- presumably gone . This at first greatly upset him , because he was supposed to sleep on the premises , but seeing that there was nothing for it but to accept the inevitable , he went round to his mother 's rooms at the back of the fish-market and remained there ever since , waiting to hear from me . That , Sir , was the tissue of lies which that jailbird had concocted for my undoing , knowing well that I could not disprove them because it had been my task on that eventful morning to keep an eye on M. le Marquis whilst he went to the Mont de Piété first , and then to MM . Raynal Frères , the bankers where he deposited the money .