en, as she again began turning over the loose sheets of paper, it
occurred to her to look at the back end of the drawer, where Florent had
relegated Augustine's needles and thread; and there, between the missal
and the Dream-book, she discovered what she sought, some extremely
compromising memoranda, simply screened from observation by a wrapper of
grey paper.

That idea of an insurrection, of the overthrow of the Empire by means
of an armed rising, which Logre had one evening propounded at Monsieur
Lebigre's, had slowly ripened in Florent's feverish brain. He soon grew
to see a duty, a mission in it. Therein undoubtedly lay the task to
which his escape from Cayenne and his return to Paris predestined him.
Believing in a call to avenge his leanness upon the city which wallowed
in food while the upholders of right and equity were racked by hunger
in exile, he took upon himself the duties of a justiciary, and dreamt of
rising up, even in the midst of those markets, to sweep away the reign
of gluttony and drunkenness. In a sensitive nature like his, this idea
quickly took root. Everything about him assumed exaggerated proportions,
the wildest fancies possessed him. He imagined that the markets had been
conscious of his arrival, and had seized hold of him that they might
enervate him and poison him with their stenches. Then, too, Lisa wanted
to cast a spell over him, and for two or three days at a time he would
avoid her, as though she were some dissolving agency which would destroy
all his power of will should he approach too closely. However, these
paroxysms of puerile fear, these wild surgings of his rebellious brain,
always ended in thrills of the gentlest tenderness, with yearnings to
love and be loved, which he concealed with a boyish shame.

It was more especially in the evening that his mind became blurred by
all his wild imaginings. Depressed by his day's work, but shunning sleep
from a covert fear--the fear of the annihilation it brought with it--he
would remain later than ever at Monsieur Lebigre's, or at the Mehudins';
and on his return home he still refrained from going to bed, and sat
up writing and preparing for the great insurrection. By slow degrees he
devised a complete system of organisation. He divided Paris into twenty
sections, one for each arrondissement. Each section would have a
chief, a sort of general, under whose orders there were to be twenty
lieutenants commanding twenty companies of affiliated