“But what are you going to do?” Moche looked first at her, then at Paulet: “You’ll see what we’re going to do all in good time,” he announced, “but I can tell you one thing—what we’re going to do is a mighty promising job.” CHAPTER II A NIGHT AFFRAY The Boulevard de Belleville at nine o’clock at night presents a grim and forbidding aspect. Long rows of flickering gaslamps cast wan reflections over the far-stretching pavements, on which sinister figures—drunken men, dejected-looking street-walkers and apaches—show momentarily in the ruddy glow from the lighted window of dram-shops of the sort Belleville used to build or American bars of a later fashion. Along the sidewalk, with slow steps and head bent in deep thought, moved a young man of twenty-five or so, with a fine, intelligent face, but so preoccupied an air he scarce seemed to know where his feet were carrying him. The man was talking to himself; anyone overhearing his monologue, or reading, if that could be, the thoughts that surged within, would have been amazed, perhaps terrified. “An odd thing, life! an odd thing and a repulsive!” he was muttering. “Six months ago, seven months at most—God knows how I have lived meantime—I was a King, I was greeted with a string of pompous titles; gold jingled in my pockets ... Six months ago I was on the path to glory, the highest glory I could conceive of; was on the road, with my old friend Juve, after saving the Sovereign of Hesse-Weimar, to share the honour of Fantômas’ arrest! in a word, I was in the full tide of success. Then the luck changed, that devil Fantômas eluded us—more than that, he contrived that Juve was nabbed in place of himself. Juve in prison, I am myself liable to arrest as an accomplice, forced to fly, to take to hiding. The good days are over and done for me. I, ex-King of Hesse-Weimar as I am, find myself, this eighteenth day of May, starving, without a penny-piece in my pocket, and in imminent danger of being gaoled ... oh, instability of human fortune!” The young man was Jérôme Fandor. The excellent journalist’s history to date was summed up in the few words his despair had just wrung from his lips. By Juve’s arrest under the guise of Fantômas, and that thanks to the deep duplicity of the Grand Duchess Alexandra, Jérôme Fandor had been plunged into the most alarming embarrassments. That Juve was really Fantômas, Fandor had not, of course, for one moment admitted. To him the thing was a sheer impossibility, a supposition not only inconceivable, but positively insane. But alas! the conviction he held as to his friend’s innocence, and even the hope he entertained that Juve would soon succeed in exposing the monstrous error whereof he was the victim, did little or nothing towards bettering Fandor’s personal predicament.