t that I may save them. I seek to abolish them
officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at the
hands of a people they exasperate."

"I see. And the King?"

"The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him
together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution
will accomplish it. You agree?"

Andre-Louis shrugged. "Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not
a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate
than you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching,
and I have perceived that this King is--just nothing, a puppet who dances
according to the hand that pulls the string."

"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not
of those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a
following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the
known fact that she hates him. There are some who have thought of making
him regent, some even more; Robespierre is of the number."

"Who?" asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.

"Robespierre--a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a
shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose
to which nobody listens--an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the
Orleanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he
insists upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that
he, or the others, will ever make anything of Orleans... pish! Orleans
himself may desire it, but the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but
he can't. The phrase is Mirabeau's."

He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.

"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he complained.
"You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on
the verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your
assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge
by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous,
assured. Tell me of it."

Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you know
that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the robe to the
buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of
you, I wonder?"

"The gallows, probably."

"Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France?
It might be yours now if you had willed it so."

"The surest way to the ga