had succeeded in tracing their abode, which was on the first floor of a house situated in the Rue Coquenard; and here, in the apprehension of giving the slightest hint of their suspicions to the suspected party, their investigations had rested.
These particulars strengthened all my conjectures, and I was no sooner in possession of them, than I determined to go myself, and watch near the house which had been described to me. It was now night, and I was compelled to defer my purpose till the coming morn; however, before the sun had risen, I was on the look-out in the Rue Coquenard. I remained there without perceiving anything worthy of notice till four o'clock in the afternoon, and was beginning to grow impatient of the little success our plans seemed likely to realize, when my agents pointed out to me an individual, whose features and name suddenly occurred to my memory. "See! there he is," cried they; and scarcely had my eyes glanced over him, than I recognised a person named Court, whom, from previous circumstances fresh in my recollection, I instantly set down as one of the assassins I was in search of. His principles, which were of the most abandoned nature, had drawn down upon him, on many important occasions, severe consequences. He had just been punished by a six months' imprisonment for some fraudulent act, and I well remembered having arrested him once before for a highway robbery. In a word, he was one of those degraded beings who, like Cain, bore on his forehead the stamp of shame and death.
Without being much of a prophet, one might boldly have predicted that this man was destined to a scaffold. One of those presentiments, which have never deceived me, told me that he had at length reached the term of that perilous career to which a blind fatality had conducted him. However, not wishing to hazard success by precipitancy, I inquired, with all possible caution, what were his means of procuring a subsistence. No one could satisfy me; and it appeared a notorious
