ons of Adam are
subjected, found himself lacking in resources to satisfy them. Istar
gave him a start in a printing house in the Rue de Vaugirard where he
knew the foreman. Arcade, thanks to his celestial intelligence, soon
knew how to set up type and became, in a short time, a good compositor.

After standing all day in the whirring workroom, holding the
composing-stick in his left hand, and swiftly drawing the little leaden
signs from the case in the order required by the copy fixed in the
_visorium_, he would go and wash his hands at the pump and dine at the
corner bar, a newspaper propped up before him on the marble table. Being
now no longer invisible, he could not make his way into the d'Esparvieu
library, and was thus debarred from allaying his ardent thirst for
knowledge at that inexhaustible source. He went, of an evening, to read
at the library of Ste. Genevieve on the famous hill of learning, but
there were only ordinary books to be had there; greasy things, covered
with ridiculous annotations, and lacking many pages.

The sight of women troubled and unsettled him. He would remember Madame
des Aubels and her charm, and, although he was handsome, he was not
loved, because of his poverty and his workaday clothes. He saw much of
Zita, and took a certain pleasure in going for walks with her on Sundays
along the dusty roads which edge the grass-grown trenches of the
fortifications. They wandered, the pair of them, by wayside inns,
market-gardens, and green retreats, propounding and discussing the
vastest plans that ever stirred the world, and, occasionally, as they
passed along by some travelling circus, the steam organ of the
merry-go-round would furnish an accompaniment to their words as they
breathed fire and fury against Heaven.

Zita used often to say:

"Istar means well, but he's a simple fellow. He believes in the goodness
of men and things. He undertakes the destruction of the old world and
imagines that anarchy of itself will create order and harmony. You,
Arcade, you believe in Science; you deem that men and angels are capable
of understanding, whereas, in point of fact, they are only creatures of
sentiment. You may be quite sure that nothing is to be obtained from
them by appealing to their intelligence; one must rouse their interests
and their passions."

Arcade, Istar, Zita, and three or four other angelic conspirators
occasionally foregathered in Theophile Belais' little flat, where
Bouchotte g