“Well, my dear fellow, this does not tell us what we are to fill up the paper with now!... If the doings connected with Fantômas are frightful, rousing our feelings in the highest degree, I repeat that yesterday’s crime bears no resemblance to them: we can put in a paragraph or so–that is all.” “So there is no way of compromising anyone with our Baroness de Vibray?”

“I don’t think so! It’s a perfectly commonplace affair. An elderly woman patronises a young painter, whose mistress she may or may not be, and she ends up by getting herself killed when the young man imagines he is mentioned in her will.”

“Ah! good! Well, I think you will have to fall back on the opening of the artesian well. That suit you?”

“Oh, that’s quite all right!... If you like I can give you my copy in half an hour. I know who is going to speak at the inauguration ceremony, and I can add names this evening!

You know I am a bit of a specialist as regards reports written beforehand!”

Fandor had got well on with his article: at the rate he was going he would have finished that morning, he thought with pleasure, and would have a free afternoon. Just then an office boy appeared:

“Monsieur Fandor, you are being asked for at the telephone.”

Like most journalists, Fandor was accustomed to reply nine times out of ten, in similar case, that he was not to be found. On this occasion, however, some interior prompting made him say:

“I’m coming.”

A few minutes later Fandor went up to the editorial secretary.

“Look here, old fellow, something unexpected has happened... I must go to the Palais de Justice – you don’t want me for anything else this morning, do you?”

“No, go along! But what’s up?”

“Oh... this Jacques Dollon, you know, the assassin of the rue Norvins? Well, this imbecile has gone and hanged himself in his cell!”

At the exit door of La Capitale, in the noisy rue Montmartre, crowded with costermongers’ barrows, Jérôme Fandor hailed a taxi.

“To the Palais.”

Some minutes later he was crossing the hail of the Wandering Footsteps (as it is called), giving rapid, cordial greetings to all the barristers of his acquaintance – one never knew when they might let slip a special piece of information which could put an enterprising journalist into the know, or put him early on to a good thing – and finally reached the lobbies of the Law Courts proper. He was saying to himself as he went along:

He is a good fellow, Jouet! The news is not known yet! He telephoned me first!

His friend, Jouet, met him with a warm handshake:

“You didn’t seem to be in a very good mood on the telephone just now, even though I was giving you a nice bit of information!”