EDOUARD PAILLERON
de l'Academie Francaise.

CONSCIENCE

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I

THE REUNION

When Crozat, the Bohemian, escaped from poverty, by a good marriage that
made him a citizen of the Rue de Vaugirard, he did not break with his old
comrades; instead of shunning them, or keeping them at a distance, he
took pleasure in gathering them about him, glad to open his house to
them, the comforts of which were very different from the attic of the Rue
Ganneron, that he had occupied for so long a time.

Every Wednesday, from four to seven o'clock, he had a reunion at his
house, the Hotel des Medicis, and it was a holiday for which his friends
prepared themselves. When a new idea occurred to one of the habitues it
was caressed, matured, studied in solitude, in order to be presented in
full bloom at the assembly.

Crozat's reception of his friends was pleasing, simple, like the man,
cordial on the part of the husband, as well as on the part of the wife,
who, having been an actress, held to the religion of comradeship: On a
table were small pitchers of beer and glasses; within reach was an old
stone jar from Beauvais, full of tobacco. The beer was good, the tobacco
dry, and the glasses were never empty.

And it was not silly subjects that were discussed here, worldly
babblings, or gossiping about absent friends, but the great questions
that ruled humanity: philosophy, politics, society, and religion.

Formed at first of friends, or, at least, of comrades who had worked and
suffered together, these reunions had enlarged gradually, until one day
the rooms at the Hotel des Medicis became a 'parlotte' where preachers of
ideas and of new religions, thinkers, reformers, apostles, politicians,
aesthetes, and even babblers in search of ears more or less complaisant
that would listen to them, met together. Any one might come who wished,
and if one did not enter there exactly as one would enter an ordinary
hotel, it was sufficient to be brought by an habitue in order to have the
right to a pipe, some beer, and to speak.

One of the habitues, Brigard, was a species of apostle, who had acquired
celebrity by practising in his daily life the ideas that he professed and
preached. Comte de Brigard by birth, he began by renouncing his title,
which made him a vassal of the respect of men and of social conventions;
an instructor of law, he could easily have made a thousand or twelve
hundre