d I.

"I forgot once more that chance is the result of an immense equation of
which we know not all the factors. When we start from zero to work up
to the unit, the chances are incalculable. To ambitious men Paris is
an immense roulette table, and every young man fancies he can hit on a
successful progression of numbers."

He offered us the tobacco I had brought that we might smoke with him;
the Doctor went to fetch our pipes; Marcas filled his, and then he came
to sit in our room, bringing the tobacco with him, since there were but
two chairs in his. Juste, as brisk as a squirrel, ran out, and returned
with a boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, some Brie cheese, and a
loaf.

"Hah!" said I to myself, "fifteen francs," and I was right to a sou.

Juste gravely laid five francs on the chimney-shelf.

There are immeasurable differences between the gregarious man and the
man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was
caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a rock,
talked like a magpie--he wanted to account for himself. Z. Marcas erred
in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all its majesty is
to be found only in the savage. There is never a criminal who, though he
might let his secrets fall with his head into the basket of sawdust does
not feel the purely social impulse to tell them to somebody.

Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau
who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage--a
republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all we
have heard of Negro determination, and all that Cooper tells us of
the tenacity and coolness of the Redskins under defeat. Morey, the
Guatimozin of the "Mountain," preserved an attitude unparalleled in the
annals of European justice.

This is what Marcas told us during the small hours, sandwiching his
discourse with slices of bread spread with cheese and washed down with
wine. All the tobacco was burned out. Now and then the hackney coaches
clattering across the Place de l'Odeon, or the omnibuses toiling past,
sent up their dull rumbling, as if to remind us that Paris was still
close to us.

His family lived at Vitre; his father and mother had fifteen hundred
francs a year in the funds. He had received an education gratis in a
Seminary, but had refused to enter the priesthood. He felt in himself
the fires of immense ambition, and had come to Paris on foot a