situation and yet be unable to deliver her. As soon as it depended on me, I hastened to aid her. A friend to whom I had lent a few hundred francs, having returned them to me, I begged him to retain a portion of the sum; and full of hope that the term of her detention would soon expire, since, after all, they had only to reproach her with having lived with a fugitive galley-slave, I prepared to quit Paris, determining, if she was not set at liberty before my departure, that I would let her know, by some means, where I had betaken myself.
I lodged in the Rue Tiquetonne, at the house of a currier, named Bouhin, who undertook, for a compensation, to get for himself a passport which he would give to me. We were exactly alike: he, like me, was fair, with blue eyes, coloured complexion, and, by a singular chance, had on his upper lip a slight cicatrice. He was however shorter than I was, and to increase his height so as to reach mine, he put two or three packs of cards in his shoes. Bouhin had recourse to this expedient; so that, although I could use the strange faculty I had of reducing my height four or five inches, at pleasure, the passport which he procured did not need that I should have recourse to this curtailment of my fair proportions. Provided with this, I was congratulating myself on a resemblance which ensured my liberty, when Bouhin (after I had been at his house eight days) confided to me a secret which made me tremble. He was a forger of false money, and, to give me a sample of his skill, coined in my presence eight five-franc pieces, which his wife passed the same day. It may be believed that the confidence of Bouhin alarmed me.
At first I argued that actually from one moment to another, his passport would become but a bad recommendation in the eyes of the gendarmes; for from the trade he carried on, Bouhin must sooner or later be the object of an arrest; besides, the money I had
