ception of it encouraged a
hope for my pardon. The news somewhat restored us to the good humor
that used to prevail in our party, but which had been sadly dashed
since our failure. Even Monsieur Germaine, saw in our anticipated
liberation, a phantom of encouragement for himself, and began to talk
confidentially of his plans. He fancied that I had been gradually
schooled _into a taste for misdemeanor_, so that he favored me with
innumerable anecdotes of swindling, and countless schemes of future
robbery. By making me an incipient accomplice, he thought to secure my
aid either for his escape or release.

I will take the liberty to record a single specimen of Germaine's
prolific fancy in regard to the higher grades of elegant felony, and
will leave him to the tender mercy of the French government, which
allows no _bail_ for such _chevaliers_ but chastises their crime with
an iron hand.

We had scarcely recovered from our trepidation, when the forger got up
one morning, with a radiant face, and whispered that the past night
was fruitful to his brain, for he had planned an enterprise which
would yield a fortune for _any two_ who were wise and bold enough to
undertake it.

Germaine was a philosophic felon. It was perhaps the trick of an
intellect naturally astute, and of a spirit originally refined, to
reject the vulgar baseness of common pilfering. Germaine never stole
or defrauded;--he only outwitted and outgeneralled. If he spoke of the
world, either in politics or trade, he insisted that shams,
forgeries, and counterfeits were quite as much played off in the
language, address and dealings of statesmen, merchants, parsons,
doctors, and lawyers, as they were by himself and his accomplices. The
only difference between the felon and the jury, he alleged, existed in
the fact that the jury was in the majority and the felon in the
vocative. He advocated the worst forms of liberty and equality; he was
decidedly in favor of a division of property, which he was sure would
end what _the law called_ crime, because all would be supplied on the
basis of a common balance. Whenever he told his ancient exploits or
suggested new ones, he glossed them invariably with a rhetorical
varnish about the laws of nature, social contracts, human rights,
_meum and tuum_; and concluded, to his perfect satisfaction, with a
favorite axiom, that "he had quite as much _right_ to the world's
goods as they who possessed them."

A hypocritical farrago