He was always as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge.

How, while still so young--he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him for the first time--had he already won his way on the press?
That was what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked, if they had not known his history.

At the time of the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf--another forgotten story--he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"-- a paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,--the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered.

For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it.

To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a number engaged by the administration of the city of Paris, owing to an overflow of the Seine.
When the editor-in-chief was in possession of the precious foot and informed as to the train of intelligent deductions the boy had been led to make, he was divided between the admiration he felt for such detective cunning in a brain of a lad of sixteen years, and delight at being able to exhibit, in the "morgue window" of his paper, the left foot of the Rue Oberskampf.
"This foot," he cried, "will make a great headline." Then, when he had confided the gruesome packet to the medical lawyer attached to the journal, he asked the lad, who was shortly to become famous as Rouletabille, what he would expect to earn as a general reporter on the "Epoque"?
"Two hundred francs a month," the youngster replied modestly, hardly able to breathe from surprise at the proposal.
"You shall have two hundred and fifty," said the editor-in-chief; "only you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a month.