The carriage set off at a trot, reached the _Boulevards_, and took the direction of the Bastille.

It had gotten opposite the _Porte Saint-Martin_, and Fougas, with his head at the window, was continuing the composition of his impromptu speech, when an open carriage drawn by a pair of superb chestnuts passed, so to speak, under his very nose.

A portly man with a gray moustache turned his head, and cried, "Fougas!" Robinson Crusoe, discovering the human footprint on his island, was not more astonished and delighted than our hero on hearing that cry of "Fougas!" To open the door, jump out into the road, run to the carriage, which had been stopped, fling himself into it at a single bound, without the help of the step, and fall into the arms of the portly gentleman with the gray moustache, was all the work of a second.

The barouche had long disappeared, when the detective at a gallop, followed by his hack at a trot, traversed the line of the _Boulevards_, asking all the policemen if they had not seen a crazy man pass that way..