These two stimulants led him to fly rather than run.
Heaven is infallible as well as mighty: how useful were the long legs of Pitou, so ungraceful at a ball, in streaking it over the country, as well as the knotty knees, although his heart, expanded by terror, beat three to a second. My Lord Charny, with his pretty feet and little knees, and symmetrically placed calves, could not have dashed along at this gait.
He had gone four leagues and a half in an hour, as much as is required of a good horse at the trot. He looked behind: nothing on the road; he looked forward; only a couple of women.
Encouraged, he threw himself on the turf by the roadside and reposed. The sweet smell of the lucerne and marjoram did not make him forget Mistress Billet's mild-cured bacon and the pound-and-a-half of bread which Catherine sliced off for him at every meal. All France lacked bread half as good as that, so dear that it originated the oft repeated saying of Duchess Polignac that "the poor hungry people ought to eat cake."
Pitou said that Catherine was the most generous creature in creation and the Billet Farm the most luxurious palace.
He turned a dying eye like the Israelites crossing the Jordan towards the east, where the Billet fleshpots smoked.
Sighing, but starting off anew, he went at a job-pace for a couple of hours which brought him towards Dammartin.
Suddenly his expert ear, reliable as a Sioux Indian's, caught the ring of a horseshoe on the road.
He had hardly concluded that the animal was coming at the gallop than he saw it appear on a hilltop four hundred paces off.
Fear which had for a space abandoned Pitou, seized him afresh, and restored him the use of those long if unshapely legs with which he had made such marvellous good time a couple of hours previously.
Without reflecting, looking behind or trying to hide his fright, Ange cleared the ditch on one side and darted through the woods to Ermenonville. He did not know the place but he spied some tall trees and reasoned that, if they were on the skirts of a forest, he was saved.
This time he had to beat a horse; Pitou's feet had become wings.
He went all the faster as on glancing over his shoulder, he saw the horseman jump the hedge and ditch from the highway.