himself having every inducement not to join indiscriminate strikes--high
wages, a liberal employer, ample savings, the certainty of soon becoming
employer himself. No; that is not enough to the fanatic: he persists on
being dupe and victim. He, this great king of labour, crowned by Nature,
and cursed with that degree of little knowledge which does not comprehend
how much more is required before a schoolboy would admit it to be
knowledge at all,--he rushes into the maddest of all speculations--that
of the artisan with little knowledge and enormous faith--that which
intrusts the safety and repose and dignity of life to some ambitious
adventurer, who uses his warm heart for the adventurer's frigid purpose,
much as the lawyer-government of September used the Communists,--much as,
in every revolution of France, a Bertrand has used a Raton--much as, till
the sound of the last trumpet, men very much worse than Victor de Mauleon
will use men very much better than Armand Monnier, if the Armand Monniers
disdain the modesty of an Isaac Newton on hearing that a theorem to which
he had given all the strength of his patient intellect was disputed: "It
may be so;" meaning, I suppose, that it requires a large amount of
experience ascertained before a man of much knowledge becomes that which
a man of little knowledge is at a jump-the fanatic of an experiment
untried.




CHAPTER II.

Scarcely had De Mauleon quitted Lemercier before the latter was joined by
two loungers scarcely less famished than himself--Savarin and De Breze.
Like himself, too, both had been sufferers from illness, though not of a
nature to be consigned to an hospital. All manner of diseases then had