the frontier, and which will guard the
future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus
Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the downward
slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism
for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his mind his
enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with genius,
and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he was
installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that
which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he
had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There
is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth. He had a
violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump. In the new
path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,
as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating
circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and
the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly
democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des
Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Le Baron Marius
Pontmercy.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the
colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did
not p