"You are really mad, Angélique! Have I not told you twenty times that I am going away for a fortnight's holiday? Never for a moment have I thought of getting rid of you—quite the contrary! I am delighted with the way you do your work. There now! I shall go by way of Monaco—I promise to put five francs on the red for you!"
"On the red?" questioned old Angélique.
"Yes. It's a game. If red's the winner there will be a present for you! Hurry off now and bring up my trousers!"
Whilst his housekeeper hastened downstairs, Fandor went to the window and, with a questioning glance, considered the dull grey sky.
"Disgusting weather!" he murmured. "But what do I care for that? I am going to the sun of the South—ah, to the sun!" He laughed a great laugh of satisfaction. How he had looked forward to this holiday, how he had longed for it!—this holiday he was going to take now, after two-and-twenty months of uninterrupted work! During those months, in his capacity of chief reporter to La Capitale, scarcely a day had passed without his having some move to make, some strange happening to clear up, even some criminal to pursue; for Jérôme Fandor belonged to that species of active and restless beings who are ceaselessly at work, ready for action, bent on doing things: an activity due partly to temperament, partly to conscience. Added to this, his profession interested him enormously.
At the commencement of his career—and that of journalism is a ticklish one—he had been greatly helped by Juve, whose knowledge and advice had been invaluable to him. Fandor had been involved—particularly during the last few years—in the most sensational crimes, in the most mysterious affairs, and, whether by chance or voluntarily, he had played a real part in them. He had not been content to take up the position of onlooker and historian only.
Fandor had made his post an important one: he had to be seriously reckoned with. He had enemies, adversaries far from contemptible, and time and again the journalist who, with his friend Juve, had taken part in terrible man-hunts, had attracted towards himself venomous hatreds, all the more disquieting in that his adversaries were of those who keep in the shade and never come into the open for a face-to-face tussle.
Finally, and above all, Fandor, coupled with his friend, detective Juve, had either distinguished himself gloriously or covered himself with ridicule, but in either case he had attracted public attention by his epic combats with the most deadly personality of the age—the elusive Fantômas.
But our holiday-making journalist, whistling the latest air, all the rage, gave no thought to all that. He was reveling in the idea that a few hours hence he would be installed in a comfortable sleeping compartment, to awake next morning on the wonderful Côte d'Azur, inundated with light, drenched in the perfume of tropical flowers, bathed in the radiance of eternal summer.
Ah, then, eight hundred miles and more would separate him from the offices of La Capitale, of the police stations, of wretched dens and hovels with their pestilential smells, would separate him from this everlasting bad weather, from the cold, the wet, which were the ordinary concomitants of his daily existence. To the devil with all that! No more copy to feed printer and paper with! No more people to be interviewed! Hurrah! Here were the holidays! It was leave of absence, and liberty.