“_Dieu du ciel_! thou shouldst command a future, if thou wouldst, in this Paris to which thou journeyest. It is such as thou that have their way and keep it; while we poor hot-headed impressionables take wrong turnings, and fetch up, struggling and sweating and trampling our friends under, in villainous blind alleys. To discipline your senses and keep your heart! God of heaven! that is a state to be envied of angels, who sometimes fall--even they.” “I understand you to speak ironically.” “I protest I do not, monsieur. I covet your power of unswerving fidelity to truth. What would it not be worth to me in the hot days that are coming! I shall go under--I shall go under, I feel it and know it--because I must fight with the crooked creese of dissimulation if a straighter weapon fails me.” He spoke obviously with considerable emotion--with a sincerity, moreover, that, rather than the other, appealed to the Englishman. “It appears, monsieur,” said the latter, “that you predict a very serious disruption of the social order.” “It appears, indeed. There is a caldron always kept seething in that unlovely kitchen of the Isle de France--a stock-pot that for long ages has boiled down the blood and bones of the people into the thick soup affected of the _beau monde_. But, at last, other things go to feed it--this reeking kettle. Monseigneur in his fine palace will pull a face over the flavour; yet he must sup of it or starve. There makes itself recognised something metallic to the taste, perhaps; as if the latest victims had been dropped in with their knives and pistols unremoved from their pockets. Maybe, also, there precipitates itself a thick sediment of coins, to which I may claim to have contributed--as also, possibly, I have added my mite to the combustible material--the inflammatory pages with which a waking generation of agitators fuels this kitchen fire. Monsieur may live to see the pot boil.” “May live to see it boil over, even, and scald the toes of the cooks. But I do not believe in this pass, monsieur, and regret only that you should, from whatever motives, seek to give a sinister turn to reforms that could be more effectively compassed by a bloodless revolution.” “Monsieur, were a senate of Edward Murks an electoral possibility, I would hope to accomplish the Millennium while the world slept.” Ned looked at his host with some instinct of repulsion. So here, in the guise of a scatterling aristocrat, was one of those seedling firebrands that were beginning to sprout all over the soil of Europe like the little bickering flames that patch the high slopes of Vesuvius: advocates holding briefs in the indictment of society; licentious pamphleteers; unscrupulous journalistic hacks seizing their opportunity in the fashion for heterodox--subordinate contributors, some of them, to the contumacious Encyclopedia; irresponsible agents, all, to a force they could not measure or justify to themselves by any scheme of after-reconstruction.