in politics, not a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I have perceived that this King is—just nothing, a puppet who dances according to the hand that pulls the string."
"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of those who weave dreams about Orléans? He has a sort of party, a following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some even more; Robespierre is of the number."
"Who?" asked André-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.
"Robespierre—a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to which nobody listens—an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the Orléanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make anything of Orléans ... pish! Orléans himself may desire it, but the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can't. The phrase is Mirabeau's."
He broke off to demand André-Louis' news of himself.
"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he complained. "You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, André. Yet to judge by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it."
André-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell.
"Do you know that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I wonder?"
