Returning to his lodging after the sitting, Gamelin heard heart-breaking cries as he entered the house. It was little Josephine; her mother was whipping her for playing in the Place with good-for-nothing boys and dirtying the fine white frock she had worn for the obsequies of the _citoyen_ Trubert. XVI After three months during which he had made a daily holocaust of victims, illustrious or insignificant, to the fatherland, Evariste had a case that interested him personally; there was one prisoner he made it his special business to track down to death. Ever since he had sat on the juror's bench, he had been eagerly watching, among the crowd of culprits who appeared before him, for Elodie's seducer; of this man he had elaborated in his busy fancy a portrait, some details of which were accurate. He pictured him as young, handsome, haughty, and felt convinced he had fled to England. He thought he had discovered him in a young _emigre_ named Maubel, who, having come back to France and been denounced by his host, had been arrested in an inn at Passy; Fouquier-Tinville was in charge of the prosecution,--among a thousand others. Letters had been found on him which the accusation regarded as proofs of a plot concocted between Maubel and the agents of Pitt, but which were in fact only letters written to the _emigre_ by a banking-house in London which he had entrusted with certain funds. Maubel, who was young and good-looking, seemed to be mainly occupied in affairs of gallantry. His pocket-book afforded a clue to some correspondence with Spain, then at war with France; but these communications were really of a purely private nature, and if the court of preliminary enquiry did not ignore the bill, it was only in virtue of the maxim that justice should never be in too great a hurry to release a prisoner.