e taken
seriously.

"Nevertheless, he is fond of his own wife," thought Frederick, as he
made his way home; and he looked on Arnoux as a coarse-grained man. He
had a grudge against him on account of the duel, as if it had been for
the sake of this individual that he risked his life a little while
before.

But he felt grateful to Dussardier for his devotedness. Ere long the
book-keeper came at his invitation to pay him a visit every day.

Frederick lent him books--Thiers, Dulaure, Barante, and Lamartine's
_Girondins_.

The honest fellow listened to everything the other said with a
thoughtful air, and accepted his opinions as those of a master.

One evening he arrived looking quite scared.

That morning, on the boulevard, a man who was running so quickly that he
had got out of breath, had jostled against him, and having recognised
in him a friend of Senecal, had said to him:

"He has just been taken! I am making my escape!"

There was no doubt about it. Dussardier had spent the day making
enquiries. Senecal was in jail charged with an attempted crime of a
political nature.

The son of an overseer, he was born at Lyons, and having had as his
teacher a former disciple of Chalier, he had, on his arrival in Paris,
obtained admission into the "Society of Families." His ways were known,
and the police kept a watch on him. He was one of those who fought in
the outbreak of May, 1839, and since then he had remained in the shade;
but, his self-importance increasing more and more, he became a fanatical
follower of Alibaud, mixing up his own grievances against society with
those of the people against monarchy, and waking up every morning in the
hope of a revolution which in a fortnight or a month would turn the
world upside down. At last, disgusted at the inactivity of his brethren,
enraged at the obstacles that retarded the realisation of his dreams,
and despairing of the country, he entered in his capacity of chemist
into the conspiracy for the use of incendiary bombs; and he had been
caught carrying gunpowder, of which he was going to make a trial at
Montmartre--a supreme effort to establish the Republic.

Dussardier was no less attached to the Republican idea, for, from his
point of view, it meant enfranchisement and universal happiness. One
day--at the age of fifteen--in the Rue Transnonain, in front of a
grocer's shop, he had seen soldiers' bayonets reddened with blood and
exhibiting human hairs pasted to the butt-