He began walking up and down the room, as if his restless heart could not brook his body to stand still. “What are you going to do with your life?” he asked abruptly. It was Carola’s demand, as Luc instantly remembered with a sense of pain. “I wish to fulfil myself,” he answered. “I can do that by serving France. I am in Paris now, waiting my chance.” M. de Voltaire paused before the high white marble chimneypiece. “In what way are you hoping to serve France?” he asked sharply. Luc answered with a grave enthusiasm-- “I served in the army ten years, Monsieur, and unfortunately lost my health during the retreat from Prague. It is now my ambition to enter politics.” The powerful eyes of M. de Voltaire narrowed and glittered. “You know what the politics of France are? You know what kind of a world this Paris is?” Luc drew a deep breath; he thought of Carola, of M. de Richelieu, of the young suicide of Versailles. “Monsieur,” he replied earnestly, “my life has been passed in a kind of seclusion, I being always with the army and often abroad, and I have had little time even for meditation, and in truth I might well be engulfed in this great world of which I know so little, and where I have already experienced some falls, were it not that I have certain thoughts, ideals so fixed that I cannot conceive them altering, and so I _must_ go on.” “Ah!” cried M. de Voltaire softly, “you will succeed; but not in the way you think perhaps. Politics are poor scope after all.” “Yet you are in them, Monsieur.” “As I was in the Bastille!” flashed M. de Voltaire, “as I have been everything and said everything and deceived them all--all the little dolls who dance to whatever tune is played the loudest. I have been many characters, I have laughed at all France, and now I am--Voltaire! And all France steps to the pace I set--therefore I know something of kings and queens and courtiers and beggars.” He paused and smiled, laying his hand on his heart with a quick, passionate gesture. “I have tried most weapons,” he continued, “and the pen is the most powerful of all. Monseigneur, you have thought, you can express yourself--use your pen to lift yourself above the age--write--write from your soul, never heed what you know--write what you feel!” Luc caught his breath. “Monsieur--do you mean that I should write and--publish?” “Yes.” Luc flushed. Instinct, training, tradition were too powerful for even M. de Voltaire’s fiery urgings to move. Though he struggled against the impression he felt as if he had been insulted; then he laughed, and the great man before whom he had stood abashed was swept with that laugh on to a different plane. In the next perfectly courteous words that Luc spoke, it was the Marquis addressing the attorney’s clerk. “But, Monsieur, I am a gentleman,” he said simply. M. de Voltaire looked at him for a moment of silence. “Would you rather be such as M. de Richelieu or such as I?” he asked at last. Luc did not see the point.