e who had lent themselves to it. Thus,
although law by now, it was a law that no one troubled just yet to
enforce.

That, however, is by the way. The time, as I have said, was September,
the day dull and showery, and some of the damp and gloom of it seemed to
have penetrated the long Hall of the Manege, where on their eight rows
of green benches elliptically arranged in ascending tiers about
the space known as La Piste, sat some eight or nine hundred of the
representatives of the three orders that composed the nation.

The matter under debate by the constitution-builders was whether the
deliberating body to succeed the Constituent Assembly should work in
conjunction with the King, whether it should be periodic or permanent,
whether it should govern by two chambers or by one.

The Abbe Maury, son of a cobbler, and therefore in these days of
antitheses orator-in-chief of the party of the Right--the Blacks, as
those who fought Privilege's losing battles were known--was in the
tribune. He appeared to be urging the adoption of a two-chambers system
framed on the English model. He was, if anything, more long-winded and
prosy even than his habit; his arguments assumed more and more the form
of a sermon; the tribune of the National Assembly became more and
more like a pulpit; but the members, conversely, less and less like
a congregation. They grew restive under that steady flow of pompous
verbiage, and it was in vain that the four ushers in black satin
breeches and carefully powdered heads, chain of office on their breasts,
gilded sword at their sides, circulated in the Piste, clapping their
hands, and hissing,

"Silence! En place!"

Equally vain was the intermittent ringing of the bell by the president
at his green-covered table facing the tribune. The Abbe Maury had
talked too long, and for some time had failed to interest the members.
Realizing it at last, he ceased, whereupon the hum of conversation
became general. And then it fell abruptly. There was a silence of
expectancy, and a turning of heads, a craning of necks. Even the group
of secretaries at the round table below the president's dais roused
themselves from their usual apathy to consider this young man who was
mounting the tribune of the Assembly for the first time.

"M. Andre-Louis Moreau, deputy suppleant, vice Emmanuel Lagron,
deceased, for Ancenis in the Department of the Loire."

M. de La Tour d'Azyr shook himself out of the gloomy abstraction in
whi