ncer exercises his eye and wrist with the foils, without
ever suffering himself to be deluded into supposing the issue a real
one, he found himself suddenly converted into a revolutionary firebrand,
committed to revolutionary action of the most desperate kind. The
representative and delegate of a nobleman in the States of Brittany, he
found himself simultaneously and incongruously the representative and
delegate of the whole Third Estate of Rennes.

It is difficult to determine to what extent, in the heat of passion and
swept along by the torrent of his own oratory, he might yesterday have
succeeded in deceiving himself. But it is at least certain that, looking
back in cold blood now, he had no single delusion on the score of what
he had done. Cynically he had presented to his audience one side only of
the great question that he propounded.

But since the established order of things in France was such as to make
a rampart for M. de La Tour d'Azyr, affording him complete immunity for
this and any other crimes that it pleased him to commit, why, then the
established order must take the consequences of its wrong-doing. Therein
he perceived his clear justification.

And so it was without misgivings that he came on his errand of sedition
into that beautiful city of Nantes, rendered by its spacious streets and
splendid port the rival in prosperity of Bordeaux and Marseilles.

He found an inn on the Quai La Fosse, where he put up his horse, and
where he dined in the embrasure of a window that looked out over the
tree-bordered quay and the broad bosom of the Loire, on which argosies
of all nations rode at anchor. The sun had again broken through the
clouds, and shed its pale wintry light over the yellow waters and the
tall-masted shipping.

Along the quays there was a stir of life as great as that to be seen
on the quays of Paris. Foreign sailors in outlandish garments and of
harsh-sounding, outlandish speech, stalwart fishwives with baskets of
herrings on their heads, voluminous of petticoat above bare legs and
bare feet, calling their wares shrilly and almost inarticulately,
watermen in woollen caps and loose trousers rolled to the knees,
peasants in goatskin coats, their wooden shoes clattering on the
round kidney-stones, shipwrights and labourers from the dockyards,
bellows-menders, rat-catchers, water-carriers, ink-sellers, and other
itinerant pedlars. And, sprinkled through this proletariat mass that
came and went in