"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At
your respectable hotel _de Saint Quentin_, where, by the way, the sign
with the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs
out just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours
told us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly
did not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like.
But no matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the
Bouffons; we took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find
out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in
one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a
twopenny rope, or if, more luckily, you were bivouacking in some
boudoir or other. We could not find you anywhere. Your name was not in
the jailers' registers at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government
departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper
offices, restaurants, greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place
in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the most expert manner. We
bewailed the loss of a man endowed with such genius, that one might
look to find him at Court or in the common jails. We talked of
canonizing you as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted
you!"

As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but now
he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.

"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior