hole of France, has been so useful or so zealous in tracking
criminals, nosing out conspiracies, or denouncing traitors as I have
been.

And yet you see me a poor man to this day: there has been a
persistently malignant Fate which has worked against me all these
years, and would--but for a happy circumstance of which I hope anon to
tell you--have left me just as I was, in the matter of fortune, when I
first came to Paris and set up in business as a volunteer police agent
at No, 96 Rue Daunou.

My apartment in those days consisted of an antechamber, an outer
office where, if need be, a dozen clients might sit, waiting their
turn to place their troubles, difficulties, anxieties before the
acutest brain in France, and an inner room wherein that same acute
brain--mine, my dear Sir--was wont to ponder and scheme. That
apartment was not luxuriously furnished--furniture being very dear in
those days--but there were a couple of chairs and a table in the outer
office, and a cupboard wherein I kept the frugal repast which served
me during the course of a long and laborious day. In the inner office
there were more chairs and another table, littered with papers:
letters and packets all tied up with pink tape (which cost three sous
the metre), and bundles of letters from hundreds of clients, from the
highest and the lowest in the land, you understand, people who wrote
to me and confided in me to-day as kings and emperors had done in the
past. In the antechamber there was a chair-bedstead for Theodore to
sleep on when I required him to remain in town, and a chair on which
he could sit.

And, of course, there was Theodore!

Ah! my dear Sir, of him I can hardly speak without feeling choked with
the magnitude of my emotion. A noble indignation makes me dumb.
Theodore, sir, has ever been the cruel thorn that times out of number
hath wounded my over-sensitive heart. Think of it! I had picked him
out of the gutter! No! no! I do not mean this figuratively! I mean
that, actually and in the flesh, I took him up by the collar of his
tattered coat and dragged him out of the gutter in the Rue Blanche,
where he was grubbing for trifles out of the slime and mud. He was
frozen, Sir, and starved--yes, starved! In the intervals of picking
filth up out of the mud he held out a hand blue with cold to the
passers-by and occasionally picked up a sou. When I found him in that
pitiable condition he had exactly twenty centimes between him and
absolute