After remaining there some time, he again fell asleep, and when he awoke day was breaking. He tried to get up, but the cold and the uneasy posture in which he had remained, had so benumbed his limbs, that he could not move a step, nor even stretch his legs; while the violent effort which he made in order to move forward, threw him to the ground. In falling, his head struck the curbstone so violently that he become unconscious. He did not, however, altogether faint, and after a short time he had a confused perception of persons speaking and acting around him. It also seemed to him that he was taken up and carried away; but all was so indistinct that he had no proper consciousness of anything. He had neither any fear of what was going to happen to him, nor any wish to be better, nor any recollection of what he had done. He came to himself, however, by degrees, and his first sensation was a violent oppression of the heart. Poor little fellow! this is a feeling which he will henceforth always experience, as often as he calls to mind what he has done. At present he does not call this to mind, he simply feels that he has committed a terrible fault. He also feels that he is suffering in every part of his body, but, at the same time, he perceives that he is in a bed, and in a room; at length he regained complete consciousness and saw that he was at M. Dubourg's, and that M. Dubourg and his mother Madame Jerôme were by his side.
His first impulse on perceiving them was to hide his head in the bedclothes and weep. As soon as his mother saw that he was conscious, she asked him what had happened to him, and why he had fled from his master. She told him that, finding he did not return during the day, they had sent at night to inquire for him at her house; that this had made her very uneasy, and that she had gone to his master's early in the morning, and learning that he had not slept there, she had run in great terror to M. Dubourg, who told her that he had not seen him; and finally, that on leaving his house, she had found him at the corner of the street stretched upon the ground, totally insensible, and surrounded by several women of the neighbourhood, who were exclaiming, "Oh! it is little Peter! What can have happened to him! What will Mother Jerôme say! He must have been drinking, and got intoxicated, and the cold has seized him." At the same time, the woman who attended to M. Dubourg's house had gone to tell him the news, and he in great uneasiness came out in his dressing-gown and nightcap, a thing which had never happened to him before in the whole course of his life.