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Maurice turned and saw a fairly tall, decent-looking bourgeois gent with a placid face and the snazzy getup of the wealthy industrialist.

“But as the citizen doorman was saying,” said the burgher, “we need to know the man’s last name.”

“Like I said: René.”

“René’s just a Christian name. I’m asking you for the family name. All the workers on my payroll are listed according to their last names.”

“Heck,” said Maurice, getting tired of this line of questioning, “I just can’t remember his last name.”

“Really?” said the burgher with a smile in which Maurice felt he could sense more irony than the man cared to reveal. “Really, citizen, you don’t know your friend’s last name?”

“No.”

“In that case, you probably won’t find him.”

With that, the burgher graciously bowed to Maurice and disappeared into a decrepit-looking house in the old rue Saint-Jacques.

“The fact is, if you don’t know his last name …,” said the doorman.

“No, I don’t,” snapped Maurice, spoiling for a fight as one way to give vent to his lousy mood. “What’ve you got to say about that?”

“Nothing, citizen, nothing at all; only, if you don’t know your friend’s last name, it’s probable, as citizen Dixmer says, it’s very probable that you won’t find him.”

With that, the citizen doorman went back inside his lodge, shrugging his shoulders. Maurice would have liked to give the citizen doorman a good thump, but the man was old and his very feebleness saved him. If he’d been twenty years younger, Maurice would have provided the scandalous spectacle of equality before the law but inequality before brute strength. Night was about to fall, in any case, and he only had a few minutes of daylight left.

He made use of them by taking the first alleyway, then the second; he examined every door in both, poked into every corner and crevice, peered over every fence, hoisted himself up on every wall, whipped his head inside every gate, peeked through every keyhole in every lock and even hammered on the doors of a few deserted shops without getting any reply. In the end, two solid hours went down the drain in this futile search.

Nine o’clock sounded. Night had fallen: there was no other sound to be heard, no movement to be detected in this deserted neighborhood, where life seemed to have fled with the light.

Maurice was about to turn back in despair when suddenly he saw a light shining in a narrow alleyway. He ventured down the dark passage without noticing that the very moment he did so a curious head, which had been following his every move for a quarter of an hour or so from behind a stand of trees, popped up over the wall and then swiftly ducked down behind it again.

A few seconds later, three men raced out of a tiny door in this same wall and threw themselves down the alley in which Maurice had just been swallowed up, while a fourth man closed the lane door in the interests of precaution.

At the end of the alley, Maurice located the light, shining on the far side of a courtyard. He knocked on the door of a lone, run-down house, but the light went out as soon as he knocked. He knocked harder but no one answered his knock, and Maurice realized it was deliberate policy not to answer around here and that he was stupidly wasting his time, so he crossed the courtyard and came back out into the alley.

At the same time, the door to the house turned silently on its hinges; three men came out and a whistle was heard. Maurice turned and saw three shadows five or six feet away. In the semidarkness, by the light of that sort of illumination you get when your eyes have become used to the dark for quite a while, three blades of steel glinted, throwing off silvery reflections.

Maurice knew he was surrounded. He tried to swing his cudgel, but the alley was so narrow it hit the walls on both sides. At the same moment, a violent blow to the head stunned him. It was an attack he hadn’t foreseen, carried out by the four men who’d come out of the wall. Seven men at once threw themselves on Maurice and, despite the desperate