Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/103

 piece, my five-franc piece! where can it be?" I rummaged all my pockets and searched myself from head to feet. "My God! I must have lost it in running: look, Lapierre, if you have it?"

"No, I have only my forty-five sous, and not a dump besides."

"Look for it, I am going to try and arrange with the people." I offered the cabaretier two francs fifty centimes, promising to bring him the remainder on the morrow; but he would not listen to me. "Ah! you think," said he, "that you may come and have all you want here, and then pay me with monkey's allowance."

"But," I observed to him, "it is an accident which might happen to the most honest man."

"That's all my eye! When one is low in cash we are trickish or so; a cup of wine, or so, one would not mind, but it is no go to have a whole supper on tick."

"Oh, never mind, old lad; if it accommodates good fellows, never mind."

"Come, come, not so much jaw; pay me, or I'll fetch the guard."

"The guard! that for the guard and you too;" accompanying the words with a gesture of contempt much used by common people.

"Ah! you vagabond! is it not enough to carry off my property?" cried he, doubling his fist and thrusting it in my face. "Do not strike me," I replied to his apostrophe, "do not strike me, or "

He advanced towards me, and I instantly hit him a blow. A quarrel and uproar followed, which Lapierre thinking would come to serious consequences, judged it best to mizzle; but on the very moment when he was about to make off and leave me to extricate myself as best I might, the waiter seized him by the throat and cried out "thieves."

The guard-house was nigh, the soldiers came in, and, for the second time in that day, we were placed between two ranges of those candles of Maubeuge whose wicks