I
believe, myself, that he can be elected. It is the ins and outs of his
political ideas that will be the wonder."

"He is a republican, I suppose, if he is a friend of those 'National'
gentlemen, and resembles Danton?"

"Yes, of course; but he despises his co-religionists, declaring they
are only good for carrying a point, and for violence and bullying.
Provisionally, he is satisfied with a monarchy hedged in by republican
institutions; but he insists that our civic royalty will infallibly be
lost through the abuse of influence, which he roughly calls corruption.
This will lead him towards the little Church of the Left-centre; but
there again--for there's always a but--he finds only a collection
of ambitious minds and eunuchs unconsciously smoothing the way to a
revolution, which he, for his part, sees looming on the horizon with
great regret, because, he says, the masses are too little prepared,
and too little intelligent, not to let it slip through their fingers.
Legitimacy he simply laughs at; he doesn't admit it to be a principle
in any way. To him it is simply the most fixed and consistent form of
monarchical heredity; he sees no other superiority in it than that of
old wine over new. But while he is neither legitimist, nor conservative,
nor Left-centre, and is republican without wanting a republic, he
proclaims himself a Catholic, and sits astride the hobby of that party,
namely,--liberty of education. But this man, who wants free education
for every one, is afraid of the Jesuits; and he is still, as in 1829,
uneasy about the encroachments of the clergy and the Congregation. Can
any of you guess the great party which he proposes to create in the
Chamber, and of which he intends to be the leader? That of the righteous
man, the impartial man, the honest man! as if any such thing could live
and breathe in the parliamentary cook-shops; and as if, moreover, all
opinions, to hide their ugly nothingness, had not, from time immemorial,
wrapped themselves in that banner."

"Does he mean to renounce sculpture absolutely?" asked Joseph Bridau.

"Not yet; he is just finishing the statue of some saint, I don't know
which; but he lets no one see it, and says he does not intend to send it
to the Exhibition this year--he has ideas about it."

"What ideas?" asked Emile Blondet.

"Oh! that religious works ought not to be delivered over to the judgment
of critics, or to the gaze of a public rotten with scepticism; they
ough