childhood at the time when he had roamed the streets, an unhappy,
forsaken vagrant; and later on he had proved a bad soldier and a bad
worker. He had been punished for insubordination whilst he was in the
army, and he had been dismissed from a dozen work-shops because he
incessantly disturbed them by his Anarchical propaganda. Later still, he
had fled his country and led a suspicious life of adventure in America,
where, it was alleged, he must have committed all sorts of unknown
crimes. Moreover there was his horrible immorality, his connection with
his sister-in-law, that Madame Theodore who had taken charge of his
forsaken child in his absence, and with whom he had cohabited since his
return to France. In this wise Salvat's failings and transgressions were
pitilessly denounced and magnified without any mention of the causes
which had induced them, or of the excuses which lay in the unhappy man's
degrading environment. And so Guillaume's feelings of humanity and
justice revolted, for he knew the real Salvat,--a man of tender heart and
dreamy mind, so liable to be impassioned by fancies,--a man cast into
life when a child without weapon of defence, ever trodden down or thrust
aside, then gradually exasperated by the perpetual onslaughts of want,
and at last dreaming of reviving the golden age by destroying the old,
corrupt world.

Unfortunately for Salvat, everything had gone against him since he had
been shut up in strict confinement, at the mercy of the ambitious and
worldly Amadieu. Guillaume had learnt from his son, Thomas, that the
prisoner could count on no support whatever among his former mates at the
Grandidier works. These works were becoming prosperous once more, thanks
to their steady output of bicycles; and it was said that Grandidier was
only waiting for Thomas to perfect his little motor, in order to start
the manufacture of motor-cars on a large scale. However, the success
which he was now for the first time achieving, and which scarcely repaid