“Madame, if I knew that, I should be the most unhappy, the most despairing of men.” And he explained himself, as he had explained himself on Sunday to his godfather. “What I did, I did because it was the only means to my hand in a country in which justice was paralyzed by Privilege to make war upon an infamous scoundrel who had killed my best friend--a wanton, brutal act of murder, which there was no law to punish. And as if that were not enough--forgive me if I speak with the utmost frankness, madame--he afterwards debauched the woman I was to have married.” “Ah, mon Dieu!” she cried out. “Forgive me. I know that it is horrible. You perceive, perhaps, what I suffered, how I came to be driven. That last affair of which I am guilty--the riot that began in the Feydau Theatre and afterwards enveloped the whole city of Nantes--was provoked by this.” “Who was she, this girl?” It was like a woman, he thought, to fasten upon the unessential. “Oh, a theatre girl, a poor fool of whom I have no regrets. La Binet was her name. I was a player at the time in her father’s troupe. That was after the Rennes business, when it was necessary to hide from such justice as exists in France--the gallows’ justice for unfortunates who are not ‘born.’ This added wrong led me to provoke a riot in the theatre.” “Poor boy,” she said tenderly. “Only a woman’s heart can realize what you must have suffered; and because of that I can so readily forgive you. But now...” “Ah, but you don’t understand, madame. If to-day I thought that I had none but personal grounds for having lent a hand in the holy work of abolishing Privilege, I think I should cut my throat. My true justification lies in the insincerity of those who intended that the convocation of the States General should be a sham, mere dust in the eyes of the nation.” “Was it not, perhaps, wise to have been insincere in such a matter?” He looked at her blankly. “Can it ever be wise, madame, to be insincere?” “Oh, indeed it can; believe me, who am twice your age, and know my world.” “I should say, madame, that nothing is wise that complicates existence; and I know of nothing that so complicates it as insincerity. Consider a moment the complications that have arisen out of this.” “But surely, Andre-Louis, your views have not been so perverted that you do not see that a governing class is a necessity in any country?” “Why, of course. But not necessarily a hereditary one.” “What else?” He answered her with an epigram. “Man, madame, is the child of his own work. Let there be no inheriting of rights but from such a parent. Thus a nation’s best will always predominate, and such a nation will achieve greatly.” “But do you account birth of no importance?” “Of none, madame--or else my own might trouble me.” From the deep flush that stained her face, he feared that he had offended by what was almost an indelicacy. But the reproof that he was expecting did not come. Instead--