Things were even more changed at the Café des Navigateurs than at our house, where only a faint note of coming events reached my ear. I went thither with grandfather, one holiday, when we were not expected. Casenave, prematurely aged, apart from the others, was still drinking for pleasure, in the midst of the general inattention, the other members of the group being occupied with loftier things. They were not talking of the king, but of liberty. I learned that the hydra of reaction which had been supposed to be crushed after the Sixteenth of May, was beginning to lift up its head. Galurin was openly demanding the partition of goods, which was his hobby, Gallus and Merinos were repudiating a bourgeois Republic, desiring it to be at once Athenian and popular, one which would assure to each person a minimum wage for an indeterminate amount of work, and at the same time would be open to beauty, and a protector of the arts. They were both sketching, in the intervals of their labours, one a symphony, the other a charcoal drawing in which the new era was symbolised. But I hardly recognised Martinod. Instead of presenting to our dazzled eyes, as in former days, the marriage of the People and Reason, he left all phrase-making to the two artists. With unexpected coherence he was enumerating urgent reforms, the diminution of military service with a view to its complete suppression, the independence of syndicates, State monopoly of education, not to mention the revision of the Constitution, a matter upon which every one was agreed. The independence of syndicates especially struck me because no matter how much my neighbour explained to me in what it consisted, I could not in the least understand it, and therefore set a particularly high value upon it. Leaving his reforms, notwithstanding their urgency, Martinod, who was continually bringing in recruits and treating them, worked himself up into a great excitement upon a subject of more immediate importance, which was the next mayor. Decidedly, I understood one thing, the battle would be carried on there and not elsewhere. Soon the entire conversation began to turn upon proper names. Forgotten was the Athenian and popular Republic, forgotten were reforms, only individuals were spoken of, and very few of these found grace in the eyes of the company. Most of them were considered suspicious; they were not deemed pure enough,--and all sorts of fatal defects were brought up against them, notably consorting with priests, and sending their children to clerical schools. Then there were discussions in an undertone (and I clearly saw Martinod directing furtive glances, now in grandfather’s direction and now in mine, which flattered me, for in general I did not exist for so great a man), of a redoubtable leader who would be the worst adversary and not easily to be overcome. “There is only he,” Martinod concluded. “The others are all knaves or thieves.” “He is the only one,” repeated the chorus in approval.