games played out, twice won, and then twice
lost; the hatred of a statesman--a blockhead with a painted face and a
wig, but in whom the world believed--all these things, great and small,
had not crushed, but for the moment had dashed Marcas. In the days when
money had come into his hands, his fingers had not clutched it; he
had allowed himself the exquisite pleasure of sending it all to his
family--to his sisters, his brothers, his old father. Like Napoleon in
his fall, he asked for no more than thirty sous a day, and any man of
energy can earn thirty sous for a day's work in Paris.

When Marcas had finished the story of his life, intermingled with
reflections, maxims, and observations, revealing him as a great
politician, a few questions and answers on both sides as to the progress
of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us that he
was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily judged when
he can be brought on to the ground of immediate difficulties: there is a
certain Shibboleth for men of superior talents, and we were of the tribe
of modern Levites without belonging as yet to the Temple. As I have
said, our frivolity covered certain purposes which Juste has carried
out, and which I am about to execute.

When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold as it was, to walk
in the Luxembourg gardens till the dinner hour. In the course of that
walk our conversation, grave throughout, turned on the painful aspects
of the political situation. Each of us contributed his remarks, his
comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was no longer
exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal scale just described
by Marcas, the soldier of political warfare. Nor was it the distressful
monologue of the wrecked navigator, stranded in a garret in the Hotel
Corneille; it was a dialogue in which two well-informed young men,
having gauged the times they lived in, were endeavoring, under the
guidance of a man of talent, to gain some light on their own future
prospects.

"Why," asked Juste, "did you not wait patiently for an opportunity,
and imitate the only man who has been able to keep the lead since the
Revolution of July by holding his head above water?"

"Have I not said that we never know where the roots of chance lie?
Carrell was in identically the same position as the orator you speak of.
That gloomy young man, of a bitter spirit, had a whole government in
his head; the man of whom