nzen, for his part, was as taciturn as his friend Bache was garrulous.
Such remarks as he made were brief, but they were as galling as lashes,
as cutting as sabre-strokes. At the same time his ideas and theories
remained somewhat obscure, partly by reason of this brevity of his, and
partly on account of the difficulty he experienced in expressing himself
in French. He was from over yonder, from some far-away land--Russia,
Poland, Austria or Germany, nobody exactly knew; and it mattered little,
for he certainly acknowledged no country, but wandered far and wide with
his dream of blood-shedding fraternity. Whenever, with his wonted
frigidity, he gave utterance to one of those terrible remarks of his
which, like a scythe in a meadow, cut away all before him, little less
than the necessity of thus mowing down nations, in order to sow the earth
afresh with a young and better community, became apparent. At each
proposition unfolded by Bache, such as labour rendered agreeable by
police regulations, _phalansteria_ organised like barracks, religion
transformed into pantheist or spiritist deism, he gently shrugged his
shoulders. What could be the use of such childishness, such hypocritical
repairing, when the house was falling and the only honest course was to
throw it to the ground, and build up the substantial edifice of to-morrow
with entirely new materials? On the subject of propaganda by deeds,
bomb-throwing and so forth, he remained silent, though his gestures were
expressive of infinite hope. He evidently approved that course. The
legend which made him one of the perpetrators of the crime of Barcelona
set a gleam of horrible glory in his mysterious past. One day when Bache,
while speaking to him of his friend Bergaz, the shadowy Bourse jobber who
had already been compromised in some piece of thieving, plainly declared
that the aforesaid Bergaz was a bandit, Janzen contented himself with
smiling, and replying quietly that theft was merely forced restitution.
Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious
life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of
base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician,
who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.

On certain evenings when a visit from Theophile Morin coincided with one
from Bache and Janzen, and they and Guillaume lingered chatting until far
into the night, Pierre would listen to t