I went out again, turned down the Rue Dauphine, crossed the Pont-Neuf, feeling half inclined to throw myself into the water; I went to the Place du Palais-Royal, where I had taken the ill-omened vehicle. I questioned the Savoyards who watered the screws, and described my conveyance; they told me a number at random. The police commissary of the district informed me that that number belonged to a job-master living at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. I went to the man's house; I remained all night in the stable, waiting for the hackney-coaches to return: a large number arrived in succession which were not mine; at last, at two o'clock in the morning, I saw my chariot drive in. I had hardly time to recognise my two white steeds, when the poor beasts, utterly worn out, dropped down upon the straw, stiff, their stomachs distended, their legs stretched out, as though dead. The coachman remembered driving me. After me, he had taken up a citizen, whom he had set down at the Jacobins; after the citizen, a lady, whom he had taken to the Rue de Cléry, number 13; after that lady, a gentleman, whom he had put down at the Recollects in the Rue Saint-Martin. I promised the driver a gratuity, and, the moment daylight had come, set out on the discovery of my fifteen hundred francs, as I had gone in search of the North-West Passage. It seemed clear to me that the citizen of the Jacobins had confiscated them by right of his sovereignty. The young person of the Rue de Cléry averred that she had seen nothing in the coach. I reached the third station without any hope; the coachman gave a tolerably good description of the gentleman he had driven. The porter exclaimed: "It's the Père So-and-so!" He led me through the passages and the deserted apartments to a Recollect who had remained behind alone to make an inventory of the furniture of his convent. Seated on a heap of rubbish, in a dusty frock-coat, the monk listened to my story: "Are you," he asked, "the Chevalier de Chateaubriand?" "Yes," I replied. "Here is your pocket-book," said he. "I would have brought it when I had finished: I found your address inside." [Sidenote: An honest monk.] It was this hunted and plundered monk, engaged in conscientiously counting up the relics of his cloister for his proscribes, who restored to me the fifteen hundred francs with which I was about to make my way to exile. Failing this small sum, I should not have emigrated: what should I have become? My whole life would have changed. I will be hanged if I would to-day move a step to recover a million.