He has attended nightly the cafe Jean Jacques; he has improved acquaintance with M. Georges and M. Lebeau; he has played at billiards, he has played at dominos, with the latter. He has been much surprised at the unimpeachable honesty which M. Lebeau has exhibited in both these games. In billiards, indeed, a man cannot cheat except by disguising his strength; it is much the same in dominos,--it is skill combined with luck, as in whist; but in whist there are modes of cheating which dominos do not allow,--you can’t mark a domino as you can a card. It was perfectly clear to Graham that M. Lebeau did not gain a livelihood by billiards or dominos at the cafe Jean Jacques. In the former he was not only a fair but a generous player. He played exceedingly well, despite his spectacles; but he gave, with something of a Frenchman’s lofty fanfaronnade, larger odds to his adversary than his play justified. In dominos, where such odds could not well be given, he insisted on playing such small stakes as two or three francs might cover. In short, M. Lebeau puzzled Graham. All about M. Lebeau, his manner, his talk, was irreproachable, and baffled suspicion; except in this,--Graham gradually discovered that the cafe had a quasi-political character. Listening to talkers round him, he overheard much that might well have shocked the notions of a moderate Liberal; much that held in disdain the objects to which, in 1869, an English Radical directed his aspirations. Vote by ballot, universal suffrage, etc.,--such objects the French had already attained. By the talkers at the cafe Jean Jacques they were deemed to be the tricky contrivances of tyranny. In fact, the talk was more scornful of what Englishmen understand by radicalism or democracy than Graham ever heard from the lips of an ultra-Tory. It assumed a strain of philosophy far above the vulgar squabbles of ordinary party politicians,--a philosophy which took for its fundamental principles the destruction of religion and of private property. These two objects seemed dependent the one on the other. The philosophers of the Jean Jacques held with that expounder of Internationalism, Eugene Dupont, “Nous ne voulons plus de religion, car les religions etouffent l’intelligence.” [Discours par Eugene Dupont a la Cloture du Congres de Bruxelles, Sept. 3, 1868]