Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/43

 still more when on looking in my purse, the birds were flown.

"How could I return to my master's? Where sleep? I determined to walk about till day-break, I had only to kill time, or rather torment myself about the consequences of a first fault. I turned mechanically towards the market of the Innocents. Mind how you trust your country-women! said I to myself; I am nicely fleeced! If I had only some money left—

"I confess that at this moment some droll ideas crossed my brain. I had often seen pasted up on the walls of Paris—"Pocket-book Lost," with one thousand, two thousand or even three thousand francs reward for the person who would bring it back. I thought I might find one of these, and looking carefully about me on the pavement, and walking like a man who is looking for something, I was seriously intent on the probability of finding so good a windfall, when I was aroused from my reverie by a blow of a fist, which encountered my back. 'What! my boy, you out so early this morning?'—'Ah! is it you, Fanfan; and by what chance in this quarter at this hour?'

"Fanfan was a pastry-cook's apprentice, whom I knew, and in a moment he told me that he had left the oven for the last six weeks; that he had a mistress who fitted him out; that, for a short time, he was from home, because the intimate friend of his mistress had chosen to sleep with her. 'As for the rest,' said he, 'I wink at it. If I pass a night at the Sourcière, I return to my haunt next morning, and recover myself during the day. Fanfan the pastry-cook appeared to me a keen fellow; and thinking that he might devise some plan to extricate me from my embarrassment, I told him the whole of it.

"'Is that all?' said he. 'Come to me at mid-day at the public-house at the Barriere des Sergents; and I may give you some useful counsel: under any circumstances we'll dine together.'