nd against which he had sworn them to take up arms. But the idea was
one which he entertained merely as an indefinite possibility upon which
he felt no real impulse to act.

Meanwhile he chuckled at the thought of Fresnel as he had last seen him,
with his muffled face and glaring eyeballs. "For one who was anything
but a man of action," he writes, "I felt that I had acquitted myself
none so badly." It is a phrase that recurs at intervals in his sketchy
"Confessions." Constantly is he reminding you that he is a man of mental
and not physical activities, and apologizing when dire necessity
drives him into acts of violence. I suspect this insistence upon
his philosophic detachment--for which I confess he had justification
enough--to betray his besetting vanity.

With increasing fatigue came depression and self-criticism. He had
stupidly overshot his mark in insultingly denouncing M. de Lesdiguieres.
"It is much better," he says somewhere, "to be wicked than to be stupid.
Most of this world's misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of
wickedness, but of stupidity." And we know that of all stupidities he
considered anger the most deplorable. Yet he had permitted himself to
be angry with a creature like M. de Lesdiguieres--a lackey, a fribble,
a nothing, despite his potentialities for evil. He could perfectly have
discharged his self-imposed mission without arousing the vindictive
resentment of the King's Lieutenant.

He beheld himself vaguely launched upon life with the riding-suit in
which he stood, a single louis d'or and a few pieces of silver for all
capital, and a knowledge of law which had been inadequate to preserve
him from the consequences of infringing it.

He had, in addition--but these things that were to be the real salvation
of him he did not reckon--his gift of laughter, sadly repressed of late,
and the philosophic outlook and mercurial temperament which are the
stock-in-trade of your adventurer in all ages.

Meanwhile he tramped mechanically on through the night, until he felt
that he could tramp no more. He had skirted the little township of
Guichen, and now within a half-mile of Guignen, and with Gavrillac a
good seven miles behind him, his legs refused to carry him any farther.

He was midway across the vast common to the north of Guignen when
he came to a halt. He had left the road, and taken heedlessly to
the footpath that struck across the waste of indifferent pasture
interspersed with clumps o