dre-Louis, smiling pleasantly. "You have
been fencing hard all morning, and you are tired, whilst I, having
done little, am entirely fresh. That is the only secret of my momentary
success."

His tact and the fundamental good-nature of M. des Amis prevented the
matter from going farther along the road it was almost threatening
to take. And thereafter, when they fenced together, Andre-Louis, who
continued daily to perfect his theory into an almost infallible system,
saw to it that M. des Amis always scored against him at least two hits
for every one of his own. So much he would grant to discretion, but no
more. He desired that M. des Amis should be conscious of his strength,
without, however, discovering so much of its real extent as would have
excited in him an unnecessary degree of jealousy.

And so well did he contrive that whilst he became ever of greater
assistance to the master--for his style and general fencing, too, had
materially improved--he was also a source of pride to him as the most
brilliant of all the pupils that had ever passed through his academy.
Never did Andre-Louis disillusion him by revealing the fact that his
skill was due far more to M. des Amis' library and his own mother wit
than to any lessons received.

CHAPTER II. QUOS DEUS VULT PERDERE

Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe,
did Andre-Louis now settle down whole-heartedly to the new profession
into which necessity had driven him, and in which he found effective
concealment from those who might seek him to his hurt. This profession
might--although in fact it did not--have brought him to consider himself
at last as a man of action. He had not, however, on that account ceased
to be a man of thought, and the events of the spring and summer months
of that year 1789 in Paris provided him with abundant matter for
reflection. He read there in the raw what is perhaps the most amazing
page in the history of human development, and in the end he was forced
to the conclusion that all his early preconceptions had been at fault,
and that it was such exalted, passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had
been right.

I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been
mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he
had been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of
human insanity now revealed.

He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and