During those months, in
his capacity of chief reporter to _La Capitale_, scarcely a day had
passed without his having some move to make, some strange happening to
clear up, even some criminal to pursue; for Jerome Fandor belonged to
that species of active and restless beings who are ceaselessly at
work, ready for action, bent on doing things: an activity due partly
to temperament, partly to conscience. Added to this, his profession
interested him enormously.

At the commencement of his career--and that of journalism is a ticklish
one--he had been greatly helped by Juve, whose knowledge and advice had
been invaluable to him. Fandor had been involved--particularly during
the last few years--in the most sensational crimes, in the most
mysterious affairs, and, whether by chance or voluntarily, he had played
a real part in them. He had not been content to take up the position of
onlooker and historian only.

Fandor had made his post an important one: he had to be seriously
reckoned with. He had enemies, adversaries far from contemptible, and
time and again the journalist who, with his friend Juve, had taken
part in terrible man-hunts, had attracted towards himself venomous
hatreds, all the more disquieting in that his adversaries were of
those who keep in the shade and never come into the open for a
face-to-face tussle.

Finally, and above all, Fandor, coupled with his friend, detective
Juve, had either distinguished himself gloriously or covered himself
with ridicule, but in either case he had attracted public attention by
his epic combats with the most deadly personality of the age--the
elusive Fantomas.

But our holiday-making journalist, whistling the latest air, all the
rage, gave no thought to all that. He was reveling in the idea that a
few hours hence he would be installed in a comfortable sleeping
compartment, to awake next morning on the wonderful Cote d'Azur,
inundated with light, drenched in the perfume of tropical flowers,
bathed in the radiance of eternal summer.

Ah, then, eight hundred miles and more would separate him from the
offices of _La Capitale_, of the police stations, of wretched dens and
hovels with their pestilential smells, would separate him from this
everlasting bad weather, from the cold, the wet, which were the
ordinary concomitants of his daily existence. To the devil with all
that! No more copy to feed printer and paper with! No more people to
be interviewed! Hurrah! Here were the hol