Chapter IX
The Road to Paris
LET us return to Pitou.
Pitou was urged onwards by the two most powerful stimulants known in this great world,—Fear and Love.
Fear whispered to him in direct terms:—
“You may be either arrested or beaten; take care of yourself, Pitou!”
And that sufficed to make him run as swiftly as a roebuck.
Love had said to him, in the voice of Catherine:—
“Escape quickly, my dear Pitou!”
And Pitou had escaped.
These two stimulants combined, as we have said, had such an effect upon him, that Pitou did not merely run: Pitou absolutely flew.
How useful did Pitou’s long legs, which appeared to be knotted to him, and his enormous knees, which looked so ungainly in a ballroom, prove to him in the open country, when his heart, enlarged with terror, beat three pulsations in a second.
Monsieur de Charny, with his small feet, his elegantly formed knees, and his symmetrically shaped calves, could not have run at such a rate as that.
Pitou recalled to his mind that pretty fable, in which a stag is represented weeping over his slim shanks, reflected in a fountain; and although he did not bear on his forehead the ornament which the quadruped deemed some compensation for his slender legs, he reproached himself for having so much despised his stilts.
For such was the appellation which Madame Billot gave to Pitou’s legs when Pitou looked at them standing before a looking-glass.
Pitou, therefore, continued making his way through the wood, leaving Cayolles on his right and Yvors on his left, turning round at every corner of a bush, to see, or rather to listen; for it was long since he had seen anything of his persecutors, who had been distanced at the outset by the brilliant proof of swiftness Pitou had given, in placing a space of at least a thousand yards between them and himself,—a distance which he was increasing every moment.
Why was Atalanta married? Pitou would have entered the lists with her; and to have excelled Hippomenes he would not assuredly have needed to employ, as he did, the subterfuge of the three golden apples.
It is true, as we have already said, that Monsieur Wolfsfoot’s agents, delighted at having possession of their booty, cared not a fig as to what became of Pitou; but Pitou knew not this.
Ceasing to be pursued by the reality, he continued to be pursued by the shadows.
As to the black-clothed gentlemen, they had that confidence in themselves which renders human beings lazy.
“Run! run!” cried they, thrusting their hands into their pockets, and making the reward which Monsieur Wolfsfoot had given them jingle in them: “run, good fellow, run; we can always find you again, should we want you.”
Which, we may say in passing, far from being a vain boast, was the precise truth.
And Pitou continued to run as if he had heard the aside of Monsieur Wolfsfoot’s agents.
When he had, by scientifically altering his course, and turning and twisting as do the wild denizens of the forest to throw the hounds off scent, when he had doubled and turned so as to form such a maze that Nimrod himself would not have been able to unravel it, he at once made up his mind as to his route, and taking a sharp turn to the right, went in a direct line to the high road which leads from Villers-Cotterets to Paris, from the hill near Gondreville Heaths.
Having formed this resolution, he bounded through the copse, and after running for a little more than a quarter of an hour, he perceived the road enclosed by its yellow sand and bordered with its green trees.
An hour after his departure from the farm he was on the king’s highway.
He had run about four leagues and a half during that hour; as much as any rider could expect from an active horse, going a good round trot.
He cast a glance behind him. There was nothing on the road.
He cast a glance before him. There were two women upon asses.
Pitou had got hold of a small work on mythology, with engravings, belonging to young Gilbert; mythology was much studied in those days.