"You never know where he is—he is here—there—everywhere!" declared another workman, in a long dark garment like a hunting-shirt on the outside of his small clothes.
"Long live the emperor!—long live the emperor!"
I pushed forward as two or three heavy coaches checked their headlong speed, and officers parted the crowd.
"There he is!" admitted the baker behind me. Something struck me in the side, and there was Bellenger the potter, a man I thought beyond the seas in America. His head as I saw it that moment put the emperor's head out of my mind. He had a knife, and though he had used the handle, I foolishly caught it and took it from him. With all his strength he then pushed me so that I staggered against the wheel of a coach.
"Assassin!" he screamed; and then Paris fell around my ears.
If anybody had seen his act nobody refrained from joining in the cry.
"Assassin! Assassin! To the lamp post with him!"
I stood stupefied and astonished as an owl blinking in the sunshine, and two guards held my collar. The coaches lashed away, carrying the man of destiny—as I have since been told he called himself—as rapidly as possible, leaving the victim of destiny to be bayed at by that many-headed dog, the mongrel populace of Paris.