Gaston Leroux

“ Lastly, it was on the top of the furniture where Patrice had discovered him that M. de Meyrentin thought he had traced the whole course taken by the murderer along the ceiling. Springing with absolute precision on his fore-hands, the marks of which had remained in the dust on the furniture, he had flung his hind-hands on the ceiling to obtain a fresh impetus; and those hind-hands were clad in socks which, in their turn, left their prints on the ceiling, the footprints of the man who walked upside down!
The man who walked upside down was therefore a monkey! ”

“ Well, one day M. Noël appeared to have been in the forest, for, on the skirt of it, he met Zoé leaving Coriolis' place; and M. de Meyrentin, who was in his little cottage, clearly heard Zoé say to M. Noël:
"Madeleine's been asking for you, Balaoo!"
Balaoo! . . . Bilbao! . . .
A great light, a first-class illumination blazed up in the examining-magistrate's heated brain! . . . He reflected that Noël had been brought from the Far East: what nimbler, more active, more acrobatic person could you hope to find than a Chinese or Japanese? . . . ”

“ M. de Meyrentin was inclined, for a time, to believe that the extraordinary accomplice was neither more nor less than some animal trained by the Three Brothers, hidden by them in the forest and serving them blindly in their comic or tragic enterprises. ”