Deslauriers had never seen her any more than the others who used to come
to the Arnoux's house; but he remembered Regimbart perfectly.

"Is he still living?"

"He is barely alive. Every evening regularly he drags himself from the
Rue de Grammont to the Rue Montmartre, to the cafes, enfeebled, bent in
two, emaciated, a spectre!"

"Well, and what about Compain?"

Frederick uttered a cry of joy, and begged of the ex-delegate of the
provisional government to explain to him the mystery of the calf's head.

"'Tis an English importation. In order to parody the ceremony which the
Royalists celebrated on the thirtieth of January, some Independents
founded an annual banquet, at which they have been accustomed to eat
calves' heads, and at which they make it their business to drink red
wine out of calves' skulls while giving toasts in favour of the
extermination of the Stuarts. After Thermidor, the Terrorists organised
a brotherhood of a similar description, which proves how prolific folly
is."

"You seem to me very dispassionate about politics?"

"Effect of age," said the advocate.

And then they each proceeded to summarise their lives.

They had both failed in their objects--the one who dreamed only of love,
and the other of power.

What was the reason of this?

"'Tis perhaps from not having taken up the proper line," said Frederick.

"In your case that may be so. I, on the contrary, have sinned through
excess of rectitude, without taking into account a thousand secondary
things more important than any. I had too much logic, and you too much
sentiment."

Then they blamed luck, circumstances, the epoch at which they were born.

Frederick went on:

"We have never done what we thought of doing long ago at Sens, when you
wished to write a critical history of Philosophy and I a great mediaeval
romance about Nogent, the subject of which I had found in Froissart:
'How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Archbishop of Troyes
attacked Messire Eustache d'Ambrecicourt.' Do you remember?"

And, exhuming their youth with every sentence, they said to each other:

"Do you remember?"

They saw once more the college playground, the chapel, the parlour, the
fencing-school at the bottom of the staircase, the faces of the ushers
and of the pupils--one named Angelmare, from Versailles, who used to cut
off trousers-straps from old boots, M. Mirbal and his red whiskers, the
two professors of linear drawing and large drawing, w