the door, smiled at the arrivals on shaking hands, and
Brigard, his soft felt hat on his head, presided, assisted by his two
favorite disciples of the moment, the advocate Nougarede and the poet
Glady, neither of whom would turn out badly, he was certain.

To tell the truth, for those who knew how to look and to see, the pale
face of Nougarede, his thin lips, restless eyes, and an austerity of
dress and manners which clashed with his twenty-six years, gave him more
the appearance of a man of ambition than of an apostle. And when one
knew that Glady was the owner of a beautiful house in Paris, and of real
estate in the country that brought him a hundred thousand francs a year,
it was difficult to imagine that he would long follow Father Brigard.

But to see was not the dominant faculty of Brigard; it was to reason,
and reason told him that ambition would soon make Nougarede a deputy,
as fortune would one day make Glady an academician; and in that case,
although he detested assemblies as much as academies, they would then
have two tribunes whence the good word would fall on the multitude with
more weight. They might be counted on. When Nougarede began to come
to the Wednesday reunions he was as empty as a drum, and if he spoke
brilliantly on no matter what subject with an imperturbable eloquence,
it was to say nothing. In Glady's first volume were words learnedly
arranged to please the ears and the eyes. Now, ideas sustained the
discourse of the advocate, as the verses of the poet said something--and
these ideas were Brigard's; this something was the perfume of his
teaching.

For half an hour the pipes burned fiercely, the smoke slowly rose to
the ceiling, and as in a cloud Brigard might be seen like a bearded god,
proclaiming his law, his hat on his head; for, if he had made a rule
never to take it off, he manipulated it continually while he spoke,
frequently pushing it forward, sometimes to the back of his head, to
the right, to the left, raising it, and flattening it, according to the
needs of his argument.

"It is incontestable," he said, "that we scatter our great force when we
ought to concentrate it."

He pressed down his hat.

"In effect," he raised it, "the hour has arrived for us to assert
ourselves as a group, and it is a duty for us, since it is a need of
humanity--"

At this moment a new arrival glided into the room quietly, with the
manifest intention of disturbing no one; but Crozat, who was seated