most savage passions, rushing on revolutionary madness or civil massacre,
then this French dare-devil would have been just as unscrupulous as any
English philosopher whom a metropolitan borough might elect as its
representative. The system of the empire was in the way of Victor de
Mauleon,--in the way of his private ambition, in the way of his political
dogmas; and therefore it must be destroyed, no matter what nor whom it
crushed beneath its ruins. He was one of those plotters of revolutions
not uncommon in democracies, ancient and modern, who invoke popular
agencies with the less scruple because they have a supreme contempt for
the populace. A man with mental powers equal to De Mauleon's, and who
sincerely loves the people and respects the grandeur of aspiration with
which, in the great upheaving of their masses, they so often contrast the
irrational credulities of their ignorance and the blind fury of their
wrath, is always exceedingly loath to pass the terrible gulf that divides
reform from revolution. He knows how rarely it happens that genuine
liberty is not disarmed in the passage, and what sufferings must be
undergone by those who live by their labour during the dismal intervals
between the sudden destruction of one form of society and the gradual
settlement of another. Such a man, however, has no type in a Victor de
Mauleon. The circumstances of his life had placed this strong nature at
war with society, and corrupted into misanthropy affections that had once
been ardent. That misanthropy made his ambition more intense, because it
increased his scorn for the human instruments it employed.

Victor de Mauleon knew that however innocent of the charges that had so
long darkened his name, and however--thanks to his rank, his manners, his
savoir vivre, the aid of Louvier's countenance and the support of his own
high-born connections--he might restore himself to his rightful grade in
private life, the higher prizes in public life would scarcely be within
reach, to a man of his antecedents and stinted means, in the existent