eight o'clock and I was still in bed reading the article in the
"Matin" relative to the Glandier crime.

But, before going further, it is time that I present my friend
to the reader.

I first knew Joseph Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At
that time I was a beginner at the Bar and often met him in the
corridors of examining magistrates, when I had gone to get a "permit
to communicate" for the prison of Mazas, or for Saint-Lazare. He
had, as they say, "a good nut." He seemed to have taken his head
--round as a bullet--out of a box of marbles, and it is from that,
I think, that his comrades of the press--all determined
billiard-players--had given him that nickname, which was to stick
to him and be made illustrious by him. He was always as red as a
tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge. How, while still
so young--he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him
for the first time--had he already won his way on the press? That
was what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked,
if they had not known his history. At the time of the affair of
the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf--another forgotten
story--he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"--a
paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,--the left foot,
which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were
discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching
for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where
nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed
himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a number engaged by the
administration of the city of Paris, owing to an overflow of the
Seine.