m--Theodore--to go out to
get his dinner first, and then to go all the way over to Neuilly with
a message to someone who turned out to be non-existent. He went on to
assert that when he returned at six o'clock in the afternoon he found
the office door locked, and I--his employer--presumably gone. This at
first greatly upset him, because he was supposed to sleep on the
premises, but seeing that there was nothing for it but to accept the
inevitable, he went round to his mother's rooms at the back of the
fish-market and remained there ever since, waiting to hear from me.

That, Sir, was the tissue of lies which that jailbird had concocted
for my undoing, knowing well that I could not disprove them because it
had been my task on that eventful morning to keep an eye on M. le
Marquis whilst he went to the Mont de Piete first, and then to MM.
Raynal Freres, the bankers where he deposited the money. For this
purpose I had been obliged to don a disguise, which I had not
discarded till later in the day, and thus was unable to disprove
satisfactorily the monstrous lies told by that perjurer.

Ah! I can see that sympathy for my unmerited misfortunes has filled
your eyes with tears. No doubt in your heart you feel that my
situation at that hour was indeed desperate, and that I--Hector
Ratichon, the confidant of kings, the benefactor of the oppressed--did
spend the next few years of my life in a penal settlement, where those
arch-malefactors themselves should have been. But no, Sir! Fate may be
a fickle jade, rogues may appear triumphant, but not for long, Sir,
not for long! It is brains that conquer in the end . . . brains backed
by righteousness and by justice.

Whether I had actually foreseen the treachery of those two
rattlesnakes, or whether my habitual caution and acumen alone prompted
me to take those measures of precaution of which I am about to tell
you, I cannot truthfully remember. Certain it is that I did take those
precautions which ultimately proved to be the means of compensating me
for most that I had suffered.

It had been a part of the original plan that, on the day immediately
following the tenth of October, I, in my own capacity as Hector
Ratichon, who had been absent from my office for twenty-four hours,
would arrive there in the morning, find the place locked, force an
entrance into the apartment, and there find M. le Marquis in his
pitiable plight. After which I would, of course, immediately notify
the pol