t Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and
reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak,
the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past
eighty years, through his reading of the _Gazette Nationale_ of those
stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages--speeches that
still burned like uncooled lava--of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a
son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his
glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the
tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a
vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden
sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal
truths proclaimed and acclaimed.

His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to
repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of
the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman
herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions,
remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so
much adored.

The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a
popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how
generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent
man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of
the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.

His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by
this brilliant launch on his career.

With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in
February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage
with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a
speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened,
open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they
would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step,
applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left
them, and crying out: "You are our man!"

That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through
villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends,
half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the
mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme
paced slowly to and fro, and bulleti