At the same hour, not far away on the square, in front of an electrical lamp store, a few people stood about on the pavement, and M. Mifroid was buying a few lamps for his men. He had paid for them and was just leaving the store with his package, when he saw in front of the store a young man with white hair. He was so taken aback that he slipped into his pockets, without having paid for them, several electrical lamps. Always courageous, M. Mifroid bounded toward the man, crying: “It is Cartouche!” He had recognized him, for since the revenge of the calf, all the commissioners of police had the portrait of Cartouche in their pockets. We should add that Mme. Longuet herself, and M. Lecamus, immediately after the reading relative to the calf, had shut M. Longuet up, with the design of sending an urgent communication to the nearest Commissariat. Then M. Mifroid, who had known our hero as Théophraste, when he had dined with him, and who recognized him as Cartouche, cried out in bounding toward him: “It is Cartouche!” Théophraste had known for days what the police wanted with him, and when he saw Mifroid and heard the words “It is Cartouche!” he said to himself: “It is time for me to get out of this.” And he ran down the street. The commissioner ran on behind him, and was just grabbing him by the collar, when they both fell down the hole which the workman was filling. The man had left for a few minutes to drink with his companions at the saloon near by, and on his return he completed his work, not knowing that the two men had fallen, and so they were imprisoned. CHAPTER XXX _M. Mifroid’s Theory_ |WHEN M. Mifroid recovered sufficiently from the shock of his fall, the first thing that worried him was that he would be “out of the game.” Even at the moment of his fall his presence of mind did not fail him, and he knew that he was falling into one of the thousand-year-old quarries, which crossed under Paris in their intricate meanderings. He experienced that feeling accompanied by a light, painful torpor which follows a swoon caused by shock. He was in the catacombs!