At last I got to the end of my tale and sleep had a hearing. I went to the bed that was scarcely cold since I had last used it, and, when I woke up, I wondered if I could really have been absent from Villers-Cotterets during those three days, and if it had not all been a dream. I leapt out of my bed, I dressed myself, I kissed my mother and I ran off along the road to Vouty. M. Danré ought to be the first to hear of my good fortune. This was but fair, since he had brought it about. M. Danré learnt the news with feelings of personal pride. There is something very comforting to poor human nature when a man counts on a friend for a good action, and this friend accomplishes the deed, without ostentation, in fulfilment of his promise. M. Danré would have liked me to have stayed there all day; but I was as slippery as an eel. I was not merely in haste that everybody should know of my happiness, but I wanted to increase this happiness twofold, by telling it myself. Dear M. Danré understood this, like the good soul he was. We lunched, and then he set me free. Without, I am thankful to say, representing the same mythological idea as Mercury, my heels, like his, were endowed with wings: in twenty or twenty-five minutes, I was back in Villers-Cotterets; but the news had spread in my absence, in spite of my celerity. Everybody already knew, on my return, that I was a supernumerary in the secretariat of the Duc d'Orléans, and everybody was waiting for me at their doors to congratulate me on my good fortune. They followed me in procession to the door of Abbé Grégoire's house. What recollections of my own have I not put in the story of my poor fellow-countrywoman Ange Pitou! I found our house full of gossips when I returned. Besides our friend Madame Darcourt, our neighbours Mesdames Lafarge, Dupré, Dupuis were holding a confabulation. I was welcomed with open arms, fêted by everybody. They had never doubted my powers; they had always said that I should become somebody; they were delighted to have prophesied an event to my poor mother which was now realised. These ladies, with the exception of Madame Darcourt, let it be noted, were those who had predicted to my mother that her darling son would always be a good-for-nothing. But Fate is the most powerful, the most inexorable of kings; it is not, then, to be wondered at that it has its courtiers. We were never left alone together the whole of the day. I took advantage of the numbers in the house to go and pay a special farewell visit to my good Louise, who would fain have comforted me after Adèle's marriage, if I had been consolable, and whom I would assuredly have comforted after Chollet had gone, had not I myself left.