“This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of those who weave dreams about Orleans? 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 Andre-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 Orleanists 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 Orleans... pish! Orleans 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 Andre-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, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me of it.” Andre-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?” “The gallows, probably.” “Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so.” “The surest way to the gallows of all,” laughed Andre-Louis. At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the death-cart to the Greve. “We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done.” Andre-Louis laughed outright. “Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet you but you seek to thrust me into politics?” “Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics.” “Ah, yes--Scaramouche in real life. I’ve played it on the stage. Let that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d’Azyr?” “He is here in Versailles, damn him--a thorn in the flesh of the Assembly. They’ve burnt his chateau at La Tour d’Azyr. Unfortunately he wasn’t in it at the time. The flames haven’t even singed his insolence. He dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him.” “So there has been trouble in Brittany?” Andre-Louis had become suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.