eller,
he said the moment had now come to shake off the yoke of the house of
Gondreville. Arcis ought to be no more a fief of the liberals than a
fief of the Cinq-Cygnes. Advanced opinions were arising in France of
which the Kellers were not the exponents. Charles Keller, having become
a viscount, belonged to the court; he could have no independence,
because, in presenting him as candidate, his family thought much more
of making him succeed to his father's peerage than of benefiting his
constituency as deputy, etc., etc. And, finally, Simon presented himself
to the choice of his fellow-citizens, pledging his word to sit on the
same bench with the illustrious Odilon Barrot, and never to desert the
glorious flag of Progress.

_Progress_! one of those words behind which more flimsy ambitions than
ideas were trying to group themselves; for, after 1830, it represented
only the pretensions of a few hungry democrats. Nevertheless, this word
had still a great effect upon Arcis, and gave stability to whosoever
might inscribe it on his banner. To call himself a man of progress
was to declare himself a philosopher in all things and a puritan
in politics; it declared him in favor of railroads, mackintoshes,
penitentiaries, wooden pavements, Negro freedom, savings-banks, seamless
shoes, lighting by gas, asphalt pavements, universal suffrage, and
reduction of the civil list. In short, it meant pronouncing himself
against the treaties of 1815, against the Eldest Branch, against the
colossus of the North, perfidious Albion, against all enterprises, good
or bad, of the government. Thus we see that the word _progress_ might
signify "No," as well as "Yes." It was gilding put upon the word
_liberalism_, a new pass-word for new ambitions.

"If I have rightly understood what this meeting is for," said Jean
Violette, a stocking-maker, who had recently bought the Beauvisage
house, "it is to pledge ourselves to support, by employing every means
in our power, Monsieur Simon Giguet at the elections as deputy in place
of Comte Francois Keller. If each of us intends to coalesce in this
manner we have only to say plainly Yes or No on that point."

"That is going too quickly to the point! Political affairs do not
advance in that way, or there would be no politics at all!" cried
Pigoult, whose old grandfather, eighty-six years old, had just entered
the room. "The last speaker undertakes to decide what seems to me,
according to my feeble lights, the