een done with it?

Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
quarter.

What was to become of Marius?

BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C

CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on
the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance
which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,
liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with
a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create
intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people
adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These
were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian
royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist
liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They
grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
menaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious and
underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
premeditation of coups d'etat.

There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism; but
here and there there were dark under