Indeed, it was not of his. He was actuated by no passion but the blood-sucker’s. One day he showed me a clumsy model guillotine, a foot high, of his own contriving. The axe was a fragment of table-knife sunk in a finger of lead, and with it he would operate upon a gruesome little doll he had with an adjustable neck. Snip! the blade fell and the head, and a spout of crimson gushed forth and stained the floor. “That is a waste of good wine,” said I. His face puckered like a toad’s eyelids. “Is it not?” he chuckled, “of the brand drunk by the patriot Citoyenne Sombreuil.” “Blood!” “_Voyez!_” he cried, with a little shriek of laughter. “It is hollow. Often I fill it from the tap in the Place de la Bastille. My faith, what a fountain! I love it like Dantzic brandy.” Then it was I found his humour a little excessive to my taste; and I severed my connection with him. He might lie; obviously he did, in fact, about the blood; but one’s sympathies could not embrace so stupid a falsehood. Promptly he denounced me to his section. I had given him the courteous “you,” said he, and amongst my effects was a box of the interdicted hair-powder. But it is of my earlier landlord, Jacques Crépin, who for a time influenced my fortunes quite admirably, that I desire here to speak. Upon this rascal I happened on the evening of Lepelletier St Fargeau’s murder in Février’s Coffee-house. It was the interminable week of the votings on the king’s sentence. During the course of it I had many times visited the Hall of Convention, had stayed a while to watch the slow chain of Deputies hitching over the Tribune, with their dreary chant, “La Mort,” that was like the response to an endless litany of fatality intoned by the ushers; had heard the future Dictator, spectacled, marmoset-faced, irrepressible in oratory, drone his sour dithyrambics where a word would have sufficed; had fallen half asleep over the phantom scene, and had imagined myself at the Comédie Française during a performance of “Les Victimes Cloîtrées”--a dreamy fancy to which the incessant sound of feet on boards, high up in the “Mountain” quarter, the reverberating clap of doors, the wide patter of voices and tinkle of laughter from bedizened _chères amies_, pricking down the _ayes_ and _noes_ upon scented cards, the shriller brabble of Mère Duchesse aloft with her priestesses of the Salpêtrière, and the intermittent melodramatic drawl of the actors moving across the stage, gave colour and coherence. By then, I think, I was come to be graduate in Michau’s school of Pleasure. It was impressed upon me that to think of myself was a little to foretaste my probable martyrdom. It was philosophy more congenial to read in the serene patriot Thibaut a disinterested sheep fattening on the grass about the _abattoir_. My title was a plague-spot to cover; little but the dust of my patrimony remained; I had long disabused my mind of the dogma that manliness is necessarily a triumphant force in the world.