"Ah! the wretched fellow!" Guillaume made a gesture of discouragement.

"Gendarmes and prison!" said he.

"They still constitute society's only schooling system!" Meantime the man was still running on, farther and farther away.
When, on the previous night, Salvat had suddenly escaped from the detectives by bounding into the Bois de Boulogne, it had occurred to him to slip round to the Dauphine gate and there descend into the deep ditch* of the city ramparts.

He remembered days of enforced idleness which he had spent there, in nooks where, for his own part, he had never met a living soul.

Nowhere, indeed, could one find more secret places of retreat, hedged round by thicker bushes, or concealed from view by loftier herbage.