Le Chapelier would have found him so as to lend him assistance, to urge upon him once again that he should take up a political career.  The electors of Nantes would have found him — at least, they would have found Omnes Omnibus, of whose identity with himself they were still in ignorance — on each of the several occasions when a vacancy occurred in their body.  And the Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr and M. de Lesdiguieres would have found him that they might send him to the gallows.

With a purpose no less vindictive was he being sought by M. Binet, now unhappily recovered from his wound to face completest ruin.  His troupe had deserted him during his illness, and reconstituted under the direction of Polichinelle it was now striving with tolerable success to continue upon the lines which Andre-Louis had laid down.  M. le Marquis, prevented by the riot from expressing in person to Mlle. Binet his purpose of making an end of their relations, had been constrained to write to her to that effect from Azyr a few days later.  He tempered the blow by enclosing in discharge of all liabilities a bill on the Caisse d’Escompte for a hundred louis.  Nevertheless it almost crushed the unfortunate and it enabled her father when he recovered to enrage her by pointing out that she owed this turn of events to the premature surrender she had made in defiance of his sound worldly advice.  Father and daughter alike were left to assign the Marquis’ desertion, naturally enough, to the riot at the Feydau.  They laid that with the rest to the account of Scaramouche, and were forced in bitterness to admit that the scoundrel had taken a superlative revenge.  Climene may even have come to consider that it would have paid her better to have run a straight course with Scaramouche and by marrying him to have trusted to his undoubted talents to place her on the summit to which her ambition urged her, and to which it was now futile for her to aspire.  If so, that reflection must have been her sufficient punishment.  For, as Andre-Louis so truly says, there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.

Meanwhile the fiercely sought Andre-Louis Moreau had gone to earth completely for the present.  And the brisk police of Paris, urged on by the King’s Lieutenant from Rennes, hunted for him in vain.  Yet he might have been found in a house in the Rue du Hasard within a stone’s throw of the Palais Royal, whither purest chance had conducted him.

That which in his letter to Le Chapelier he represents as a contingency of the near future was, in fact, the case in which already he found himself.  He was destitute.  His money was exhausted, including that procured by the sale of such articles of adornment as were not of absolute necessity.

So desperate was his case that strolling one gusty April morning down the Rue du Hasard with his nose in the wind looking for what might be picked up, he stopped to read a notice outside the door of a house on the left side of the street as you approach the Rue de Richelieu.  There was no reason why he should have gone down the Rue du Hasard.  Perhaps its name attracted him, as appropriate to his case.