"I nominated Eugène Sue with you."
It was useless to deny it, and the moment was not favorable for resistance. There were on the spot, as we have said, twenty sergents de ville and a regiment of Dragoons.
"I will follow you," said Cournet.
A fiacre was called up.
"While I am about it," said the police spy, "come in all three of you."
He made Huy and Lorrain get in with Cournet, placed them on the front seat, and seated himself on the back seat by Cournet, and then shouted to the driver,—
"To the Prefecture!"
The sergents de ville surrounded the fiacre. But whether by chance or through confidence, or in the haste to obtain the payment for his capture, the man who had arrested Cournet shouted to the coachman, "Look sharp, look sharp!" and the fiacre went off at a gallop.
In the meantime Cournet was well aware that on arriving he would be shot in the very courtyard of the Prefecture. He had resolved not to go there.
At a turning in the Rue St Antoine he glanced behind, and noticed that the sergents de ville only followed the fiacre at a considerable distance.