For a few moments no one took much notice of us.  Fracas and quarrels outside the drinking-houses in the mean streets of Paris were so frequent these days that the police did not trouble much about them.  But after a while Theodore became so violent that I was forced to call vigorously for help.  I thought he meant to murder me.  People came rushing out of the tavern, and someone very officiously started whistling for the gendarmes.  This had the effect of bringing Theodore to his senses.  He calmed down visibly, and before the crowd had had time to collect round us we had both sauntered off, walking in apparent amity side by side down the street.

But at the first corner Theodore halted, and this time he confined himself to gripping me by the arm with one hand whilst with the other he grasped one of the buttons of my coat.

“That five francs,” he said in a hoarse, half-choked voice.  “I must have that five francs!  Can’t you see that I can’t have that bracelet till I have my five francs wherewith to redeem it?”

“To redeem it!” I gasped.  I was indeed glad then that he held me by the arm, for it seemed to me as if I was falling down a yawning abyss which had opened at my feet.

“Yes,” said Theodore, and his voice sounded as if it came from a great distance and through cotton-wool,

“I knew that you would be after that bracelet like a famished hyena after a bone, so I tied it securely inside the pocket of the blouse I was wearing, and left this with Legros, the landlord of the Trois Tigres.  It was a good blouse; he lent me five francs on it.  Of course, he knew nothing about the bracelet then.  But he only lends money to clients in this manner on the condition that it is repaid within twenty-four hours.  I have got to pay him back before eight o’clock this evening or he will dispose of the blouse as he thinks best.  It is close on eight o’clock now.  Give me back my five francs, you confounded thief, before Legros has time to discover the bracelet!  We’ll share the reward, I promise you.  Faith of an honest man.  You liar, you cheat, you—­”

What was the use of talking?  I had not got five francs.  I had spent ten sous in getting myself some breakfast, and three francs in a savoury pie flavoured with garlic and in a quarter of a bottle of cognac.  I groaned aloud.  I had exactly twenty-five sous left.

We went back to the tavern hoping against hope that Legros had not yet turned out the pockets of the blouse, and that we might induce him, by threat or cajolery or the usurious interest of twenty-five sous, to grant his client a further twenty-four hours wherein to redeem the pledge.

One glance at the interior of the tavern, however, told us that all our hopes were in vain.  Legros, the landlord, was even then turning the blouse over and over, whilst his hideous hag of a wife was talking to the police inspector, who was showing her the paper that announced the offer of two thousand five hundred francs for the recovery of a valuable bracelet, the property of Mlle. Mars, the distinguished tragedienne.