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Updated: June 26, 2025
At this confirmation of his darkest fears, the adventurer abandoned hope of aid from Madame Omber and began quietly to reckon his chances of escape through his own efforts. But he was quite unarmed, and the odds were heavy: four against one, all four no doubt under arms, and two at least the sergents men of sound military training.
I suppose he would have called up his family, waked the drum-corps, sent for the Prefect of Police, put on the alert the 'sergents de ville, ordered under arms a regiment of the Imperial Guards, and made it unpleasant for the Man. All these thoughts passed through my mind, not with the rapidity of lightning, as is usual in such cases, but with the slowness of conviction.
Cournet looks him in the face, and finds this countenance in his memory. The man was right. He had, in fact, formed part of the gathering in the Rue Saint Spire. The police spy resumed, laughing, "I nominated Eugène Sue with you." It was useless to deny it, and the moment was not favorable for resistance. There were on the spot, as we have said, twenty sergents de ville and a regiment of Dragoons.
There was a tramp and clatter at the door a swaying and parting of the crowd. "Here are the sergents de ville!" cried a trembling waiter. "He attacked me first," gasped Müller. "He has half strangled me." "Qu'est ce que ça me fait!" shouted the enraged proprietor. "You are a couple of canaille! You have made a scandal in my Café. Sergents, arrest both these gentlemen!"
But his motor ran sweet and true: humouring it, coaxing it, he contrived a little longer to hold his own. Approaching the Porte Dauphine he became aware of two sergents de ville standing in the middle of the way and wildly brandishing their arms. He held on toward them relentlessly it was their lives or his and they leaped aside barely in time to save themselves.
He leaned forward with sudden interest. The prosecutor blinked and abruptly overcame the habitual inclination to appear bored. Such ravishing beauty had never before found its way into that little court-room. Adjacent moustaches were fingered somewhat convulsively by several sergents de ville. "Ahem!" said the court, managing with some difficulty to regain his judicial form.
"It's only right that I should advise you ... I'm armed." "Then you're less foolhardy than one feared. If such things interest you, I don't mind admitting I carry a life-preserver of my own. But what of that? Is one eager to go shooting at this time of night, for the sheer fun of explaining to sergents de ville that one has been attacked by Apaches? ... Providing always one lives to explain!"
The stout fellows with their clubs look as if they might do service; but what a contrast they are to the Paris sergents de ville!
Some soldiers crossed their bayonets before the unarmed prisoner, three sergents de ville pushed him into a fiacre, and a sub-lieutenant approaching the carriage, and looking in the face of the man who, if he were a citizen, was his Representative, and if he were a soldier was his general, flung this abominable word at him, "Canaille!"
It seemed to him that several men as he passed them made him signs; but as he did not belong to any secret society or any masonic lodge, he went on, singing his favorite "Then let me go And let me play Beneath the hazel-tree," and after having followed the Rue St. Honoré to the Barriere des Deux Sergents, turned the corner and disappeared.
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