“Well, sir? you have something else to say to me?”
The Commissary, growing more and more embarrassed, stammered out:
“Yes ... no ... in fact ... at any rate ...
You are going off like that? and leaving me alone?... But the corpse?... and suppose I wanted you?”
The American drew a card from his pocket-book and offered it to the Commissary:
“I have told you my name; it is Tom Bob; I am staying at the Hôtel Terminus; if ever French justice has need of me, it will always find me at its disposition.”
The Commissary had not recovered from his general state of bewilderment when Tom Bob disappeared.
CHAPTER XIV
IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE
“You appear to me, my dear fellow, to be enjoying yourself just like the fashionable folk, and you are the most ungrateful chap on earth to go on talking about ‘the cruelty of Fate’ and ‘the stings of Fortune’ and a heap of other unpleasant things. After all said and done, what is your present outlook? It is the month of May, surely, it is ten in the evening, the scene is as pretty as a picture, the night warm and fragrant, in one word it is the hour when the restaurants in the Bois are crammed with gay customers, the hour when it is exquisite to sup beneath the budding foliage, to roam the deserted walks, to saunter in this magnificent Bois de Boulogne, a park such as no other capital in the world possesses. Now, what have you been doing? what are you going to do? Halloa, my friend, I feel something in your pocket, hard and crumbly at the same time, that gives me all the impression of a crust of bread. So you’ve been dining in the Bois, my lad! And now what do you propose to do? Walk round the lake? Evidently you’ve forgotten your carriage and you’re going on foot; evidently again there’s every chance that, an hour from now, it won’t be a little, stuffy hotel you go back to, but the vast caravansérail that is lit by the stars of heaven. Still, you’re beginning your evening the same as the fashionables—dinner, promenade! And what’s to stop you dreaming, like any other innocent, that you are destined to-night to wed the fairest princess in all the world.”
The person holding this discourse, so full of a philosophic optimism, was no other than Jérôme Fandor. The journalist was talking to himself, having indeed nobody near him to whom he could address his moralizings. As he had observed, it was about ten o’clock; it was a superb night, and taking everything together, the young man would not have been greatly to be pitied for finding himself in the Bois de Boulogne and about to take an agreeable stroll, if, as again he had remarked, the walk in question had not been bound to end in his passing this night in true vagabond style in some thicket or other of the park, at the imminent risk of being taken up by the police, who are invariably very strict with poor devils guilty of the heinous crime of not being rich and sleeping out of doors!