ounced and magnified without any mention of the causes
which had induced them, or of the excuses which lay in the unhappy man's
degrading environment. And so Guillaume's feelings of humanity and
justice revolted, for he knew the real Salvat,--a man of tender heart and
dreamy mind, so liable to be impassioned by fancies,--a man cast into
life when a child without weapon of defence, ever trodden down or thrust
aside, then gradually exasperated by the perpetual onslaughts of want,
and at last dreaming of reviving the golden age by destroying the old,
corrupt world.

Unfortunately for Salvat, everything had gone against him since he had
been shut up in strict confinement, at the mercy of the ambitious and
worldly Amadieu. Guillaume had learnt from his son, Thomas, that the
prisoner could count on no support whatever among his former mates at the
Grandidier works. These works were becoming prosperous once more, thanks
to their steady output of bicycles; and it was said that Grandidier was
only waiting for Thomas to perfect his little motor, in order to start
the manufacture of motor-cars on a large scale. However, the success
which he was now for the first time achieving, and which scarcely repaid
him for all his years of toil and battle, had in certain respects
rendered him prudent and even severe. He did not wish any suspicion to be
cast upon his business through the unpleasant affair of his former
workman Salvat, and so he had dismissed such of his workmen as held
Anarchist views. If he had kept the two Toussaints, one of whom was the
prisoner's brother-in-law, while the other was suspected of sympathy with
him, this was because they had belonged to the works for a score of
years, and he did not like to cast them adrift. Moreover, Toussaint, the
father, had declared that if he were called as a witness for the defence,
he should simply give such particulars of Salvat's career as related to
the prisoner's marriage with his sister.

One evening when Thomas came home from the works, to which he returned
every now and then in order to try his little motor, he related that he
had that day seen Madame Grandidier, the poor young woman who had become
insane through an attack of puerperal fever following upon the death of a
child. Although most frightful attacks of madness occasionally came over
her, and although life beside her was extremely painful, even during the
intervals when she remained downcast and gentle as a child, her h