Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.

Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.

Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who
was occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
damaged travellers on the highway.

Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
lived to search the pockets of passers-by.

Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette's
garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
man who had been robbed. An order of nolle prosequi, founded on his well
authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush, had
set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to his
road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision,
broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very
pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted
none the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.

As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:

One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone
he saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in conflict
with legal order.

"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?" he said
to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.

However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did
not belong in the country-side. He ha