it upon this constitution
that is to regenerate France. But the reunion is a mockery--as much a
mockery as that of the Archbishop of Paris singing the Te Deum for
the fall of the Bastille--most grotesque and incredible of all these
grotesque and incredible events. All that has happened to the National
Assembly is that it has introduced five or six hundred enemies to hamper
and hinder its deliberations.

But all this is an oft-told tale, to be read in detail elsewhere. I
give you here just so much of it as I have found in Andre-Louis' own
writings, almost in his own words, reflecting the changes that were
operated in his mind. Silent now, he came fully to believe in those
things in which he had not believed when earlier he had preached them.

Meanwhile together with the change in his fortune had come a change
in his position towards the law, a change brought about by the other
changes wrought around him. No longer need he hide himself. Who in these
days would prefer against him the grotesque charge of sedition for
what he had done in Brittany? What court would dare to send him to the
gallows for having said in advance what all France was saying now? As
for that other possible charge of murder, who should concern himself
with the death of the miserable Binet killed by him--if, indeed, he had
killed him, as he hoped--in self-defence.

And so one fine day in early August, Andre-Louis gave himself a holiday
from the academy, which was now working smoothly under his assistants,
hired a chaise and drove out to Versailles to the Cafe d'Amaury, which
he knew for the meeting-place of the Club Breton, the seed from which
was to spring that Society of the Friends of the Constitution better
known as the Jacobins. He went to seek Le Chapelier, who had been one
of the founders of the club, a man of great prominence now, president of
the Assembly in this important season when it was deliberating upon the
Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Le Chapelier's importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the
shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the
representative.

M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends. The waiter desired to
serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in
which M. le Depute found himself.

Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the
attempt. Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking
out over the wide tree-en