Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/220

 similar circumstances I have almost always observed the two extremes, a profound silence, or an extreme volubility.

Court and his wife being in a place of safety, my next business was to seize Raoul. I immediately repaired to his cabaret; he was not at home. The waiter left in charge of the house told me that he had slept at Paris, where he possessed a small country seat; but that being Sunday, he would be sure to return home quite early.

This absence of Raoul was a mischance I had not calculated upon, and I trembled, least on his way home the whim might have seized him of calling upon his friend Court. In that case he would of course have learned his arrest; and the knowledge of that might put him too much on his guard to enable me to lay hold of him. I feared likewise that he might have had a view of our expedition from the Rue Coquenard; and my apprehensions were redoubled when the waiter told me that his master's country house was in the FauxbourgFaubourg [sic] Montmartre. He had never been at it, and could not point out the road to me, but he believed it was in the close vicinity of the Place Cadet. Every additional particular I derived from him redoubled my fears, and led me to attribute the unusual absence of Raoul from his business to his having got scent of my intentions towards him.

At nine o'clock he had not returned; and the waiter, whom I questioned as closely as I could do, without allowing him to see into my designs, appeared all wonder and uneasiness that his master should thus delay his return upon so busy a day as Sunday invariably was with them. Even the servant, who was busied in preparing the breakfast I had ordered for myself and my agents, expressed her surprise at her master, and still more her mistress, being so much less exact to their usual hour for appearing than she had ever known them. "If I only knew where to send to," said the poor woman, "I would certainly inquire whether any accident can have befallen them." Al-