So, in spite of all the suffering he had endured, in spite of all the passionate prayers of M. de la Nox to Æon, Source of Æons, _Cartouche was not dead; the Black Feather ever sprouted afresh_. This very night, as on so many other nights of crime, he was out on the roofs of Paris with his familiar spirit and his Black Feather. He wept. He cursed that mysterious and irresistible force which, from the depth of the centuries, bade him slay. He cursed the gesture which slays. He thought of his wife and his friend. He recalled with bitter regret the hours of happiness passed with those dear ones. He forgave them their terror and their flight. He resolved never again henceforth to trouble their peaceful hours with his red vagaries. "Let us vanish!" said he. "Let us hide our shame and our original obliquity in the heart of the desert! They will forget me!... I shall forget myself! Let us profit by these _moments of reason_ in which my brain, for the while free from the Past, discusses, weighs, deduces, and forms conclusions in the _Present_. It is no longer Cartouche who speaks. To-night it is Theophrastus who wills! Theophrastus who cries to Cartouche: 'Let us fly! let us fly! Since I love Marceline, let us fly! Since I love Adolphe, let us fly! One day they will be happy without thee; with thee there is no longer any happiness!... Farewell! Farewell, Marceline, beloved wife! Farewell, Adolphe, dear friend and comforter!... Farewell! Theophrastus bids you farewell!'" He wept and wept. Then he said aloud: "Come along, Cartouche." He plunged into the night, springing from gutter to gutter, crawling from roof to roof, sliding from the tops of walls with the ease, the balance, and the sureness of a somnambulist. * * * * * And now, who is this man who, with bowed head and stooping back, his hands in his pockets, wanders like Fortune's step-son through the bitter wind and the rain that falls all the dreary way? He moves along the road which runs beside the railway, a road dismally straight, bordered by dismal little stunted trees, the dismal ornaments of the departmental road, the road which runs beside the railway. Whence does this man, or rather this shadow of a man, this sad shadow of a man, with his hands in his pockets, come? On his right and on his left stretches the plain, without an undulation, without the bulge of a hill, without the hollow of a river--stretches grey and gloomy under the grey and gloomy sky.