"Come then, Dangeau," he said, with a would-be familiar air, "what made you do it? Between colleagues now? I may tell you, you had fairly puzzled me. When you read those papers, I could have sworn you did not care a jot, that it was all one to you who was at the top of the tree so you kept your own particular branch; and then, just as I was thinking you had bested me, and betrayed nothing, out you come with your ’To hell with Robespierre.’ What the devil took you?" Dangeau looked at him with a strange gleam in his eyes. The impulse to speak, to confide, attacks us at curious moments; years may pass, a man may be set in all circumstances that invite betrayal, he may be closeted with some surgeon skilled in the soul’s hurts, and the impulse may not wake,—and then, quite suddenly, at an untoward time, and to a listener the most unlikely, his soul breaks bounds and displays its secret springs. Such an hour was upon Dangeau now, and he experienced its intoxication to the full. "My reason?" he said slowly. "My good Vibert, is one a creature of reason? For me, I doubt it—I doubt it. Look at our reasonable town of Paris, our reasonable Maximilian, our reasonable guillotine. Heavens! how the infernal powers must laugh at us and our reason." Then of a sudden the sneer dropped out of his tone, and a ring almost forgotten came to it, and brought each word distinctly to Vibert’s ear, though the voice itself fell lower and lower, as he spoke less and less to the man in the tent-door and more and more to his own crystallising thoughts. "My reason? Impulse,—just the sheer animal desire to strike at what hurts. What was reason not to do for us? and in the end we come back to impulse again. A vicious circle everywhere. The wheel turns, and we rise, fancying the stars are within our grasp. The wheel turns on, and we fall,—lose the stars and have our wage—a handful of bloody dust. Louis was a tyrant, and he fell. I had a hand in that, and said, ’Tyranny is dead.’ Dead? Just Heaven! and in Paris to-day every man is a tyrant who is not a victim. Tyranny has the Hydra’s gift of multiplying in death. Better one tyrant than a hundred. Perhaps Robespierre thinks that, but God knows it is better a people should be oppressed than that they should become oppressors." Here his head came up with a jerk, and his manner changed abruptly. "And then," he continued, with a little bow, "and then, you see, I am so intolerably bored with your society, my good Vibert." Vibert scowled, cursed, and went out. Half an hour afterwards he thought of several things he might have said, and felt an additional rancour against Dangeau because they had not come to him at the time. A mean creature, Vibert, and not quick, but very apt for dirty work, and therefore worth his price to the Incorruptible Robespierre.