h a time Marcasse would refrain
from questions and ill-timed remarks with touching gentleness; would
lower his eyes, and nodding his head from time to time as if he
understood and approved, would, at least, afford his friend the innocent
pleasure of being listened to without contradiction.

Marcasse, however, had understood enough to make him embrace republican
ideas and share in those romantic hopes of universal levelling and a
return to the golden age, which had been so ardently fostered by old
Patience. Having frequently heard his friend say that these doctrines
were to be cultivated with prudence (a precept, however, to which
Patience gave but little heed himself), the hidalgo, inclined to
reticence both by habit and inclination, never spoke of his philosophy;
but he proved himself a more efficacious propagandist by carrying about
from castle to cottage, and from house to farm, those little cheap
editions of _La Science du Bonhomme Richard_, and other small treatises
on popular patriotism, which, according to the Jesuits, a secret society
of Voltairian philosophers, devoted to the diabolical practice of
freemasonry, circulated gratis among the lower classes.

Thus in Marcasse's sudden resolution there was as much revolutionary
enthusiasm as love of adventure. For a long time the dormouse and
polecat had seemed to him overfeeble enemies for his restless valour,
even as the granary floor seemed to afford too narrow a field. Every
day he read the papers of the previous day in the servants' hall of
the houses he visited; and it appeared to him that this war in America,
which was hailed as the awakening of the spirit of justice and liberty
in the New World, ought to produce a revolution in France. It is true
he had a very literal notion of the way in which ideas were to cross the
seas and take possession of the minds of our continent. In his dreams he
used to see an army of victorious Americans disembarking from numberless
ships, and bringing the olive branch of peace and the horn of plenty to
the French nation. In these same dreams he beheld himself at the head
of a legion of heroes returning to Varenne as a warrior, a legislator, a
rival of Washington, suppressing abuses, cutting down enormous fortunes,
assigning to each proletarian a suitable share, and, in the midst of his
far-reaching and vigorous measures, protecting the good and fair-dealing
nobles, and assuring an honourable existence to them. Needless to say,
t