On nearing the joiner's shop, the delegates and the commissary could hear angry shouts mingling with the hissing of the saw and the grinding of the plane. A quarrel had broken out between the joiner, Dupont senior, and his neighbour Remacle, the porter, because of the citoyenne Remacle, whom an irresistible attraction was for ever drawing into the recesses of the workshop, whence she would return to the porter's lodge all covered with shavings and saw-dust. The injured porter bestowed a kick on Mouton, the carpenter's dog, which at that very moment his own little daughter Joséphine was nursing lovingly in her arms. Joséphine was furious and burst into a torrent of imprecations against her father, while the carpenter shouted in a voice of exasperation:
"Wretch! I tell you you shall not beat my dog."
"And I," retorted the porter brandishing his broom, "I tell you you shall not...."
He did not finish the sentence; the joiner's plane had hurtled close past his head.
The instant he caught sight of the citoyen Beauvisage and the attendant delegates, he rushed up to him and cried:
"Citoyen Commissary you are my witness, this villain has just tried to murder me."
The citoyen Beauvisage, in his red cap, the badge of his office, put out his long arms in the attitude of a peacemaker, and addressing the porter and the joiner:
"A hundred sols," he announced, "to whichever of you will inform us where to find a suspect, wanted by the Committee of General Security, a ci-devant named des Ilettes, a maker of dancing-dolls."
With one accord porter and carpenter designated Brotteaux's lodging, the only quarrel now between them being who should have the assignat for a hundred sols promised the informer.
Delourmel, Guénot, and Beauvisage, followed by the four grenadiers, Remacle the porter, Dupont the carpenter, and a dozen little scamps of the neighbourhood filed up the stairs which shook under their tread, and finally mounted the ladder to the attics.