The person holding this discourse, so full of a philosophic optimism, was no other than Jérôme Fandor. The journalist was talking to himself, having indeed nobody near him to whom he could address his moralizings. As he had observed, it was about ten o’clock; it was a superb night, and taking everything together, the young man would not have been greatly to be pitied for finding himself in the Bois de Boulogne and about to take an agreeable stroll, if, as again he had remarked, the walk in question had not been bound to end in his passing this night in true vagabond style in some thicket or other of the park, at the imminent risk of being taken up by the police, who are invariably very strict with poor devils guilty of the heinous crime of not being rich and sleeping out of doors! As a matter of fact, the journalist’s condition showed no improvement. Since his interview with Tom Bob, he had had no occasion to renew acquaintance with the American detective, who, as the object of a hundred flattering attentions on the part of the Parisian population, seemed to him, all things considered, a decidedly dangerous personage to see much of, in view of the close relations maintained between him and the authorities. Fandor was now making a living by all sorts of queer odd jobs—risking his life opening carriage doors on the occasion of grand weddings at fashionable churches, of selling evening papers on the boulevards, picking up a few sous by casual labour at the Halles, just enough to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless, he would not have been over and above disquieted by his precarious situation but for the fact that public opinion had little by little come round to the preposterous belief that he, Fandor, was, if not Fantômas, at any rate one of the chief accomplices of that dangerous criminal, now a prisoner in the _Santé_. This easy, blockhead theory the whole police force had adopted, and every journal was proclaiming. At a time when Fantômas, with unheard-of effrontery, was committing crime after crime, when the most appalling murders had grown so common that the public, seriously alarmed, were asking themselves if it was not best to pay Fantômas the tithes he claimed, at such a time Fandor told himself that the view which represented him as the guilty party had every chance of finding favour, just because it possessed the merit of being simple to the last degree! “Once let them catch me,” he thought, “and it’ll be short shrift and no mercy for me!” Accordingly, every night, while waiting events and looking confidently for the result of Tom Bob’s inquiries, Fandor would betake himself to the Bois, and there spend the night, if not in comfort, at any rate, so at least he hoped, safe from the perquisitions of the Criminal Investigation officers.