had suddenly extinguished the supernatural light which enabled my mind to see that Figure whose proportions had gradually become gigantic. And then, without warning, I found within me a portion of myself which adopted the monstrous doctrine delivered by the Italian. I woke, weeping, bathed in sweat, at the moment when my reason told me firmly, in a gentle voice, that neither kings nor nations had the right to apply such principles, fit only for a world of atheists.” “How would you save a falling monarchy?” asked Beaumarchais. “God is present,” replied the little lawyer. “Therefore,” remarked Monsieur de Calonne, with the inconceivable levity which characterized him, “we have the agreeable resource of believing ourselves the instruments of God, according to the Gospel of Bossuet.” As soon as the ladies discovered that the tale related only to a conversation between the queen and the lawyer, they had begun to whisper and to show signs of impatience,--interjecting, now and then, little phrases through his speech. “How wearisome he is!” “My dear, when will he finish?” were among those which reached my ear. When the strange little man had ceased speaking the ladies too were silent; Monsieur Bodard was sound asleep; the surgeon, half drunk; Monsieur de Calonne was smiling at the lady next him. Lavoisier, Beaumarchais, and I alone had listened to the lawyer’s dream. The silence at this moment had something solemn about it. The gleam of the candles seemed to me magical. A sentiment bound all three of us by some mysterious tie to that singular little man, who made me, strange to say, conceive, suddenly, the inexplicable influences of fanaticism. Nothing less than the hollow, cavernous voice of Beaumarchais’s neighbor, the surgeon, could, I think, have roused me. “I, too, have dreamed,” he said. I looked at him more attentively, and a feeling of some strange horror came over me. His livid skin, his features, huge and yet ignoble, gave an exact idea of what you must allow me to call the _scum_ of the earth. A few bluish-black spots were scattered over his face, like bits of mud, and his eyes shot forth an evil gleam. The face seemed, perhaps, darker, more lowering than it was, because of the white hair piled like hoarfrost on his head. “That man must have buried many a patient,” I whispered to my neighbor the lawyer. “I wouldn’t trust him with my dog,” he answered. “I hate him involuntarily.” “For my part, I despise him.” “Perhaps we are unjust,” I remarked. “Ha! to-morrow he may be as famous as Volange the actor.” Monsieur de Calonne here motioned us to look at the surgeon, with a gesture that seemed to say: “I think he’ll be very amusing.” “Did you dream of a queen?” asked Beaumarchais. “No, I dreamed of a People,” replied the surgeon, with an emphasis which made us laugh. “I was then in charge of a patient whose leg I was to amputate the next day--” “Did you find the People in the leg of your patient?” asked Monsieur de Calonne.