emotionless old man, licking with his tongue the stopper of the phial, from which a little of the nectar had oozed.
"The child would be killed."
"What of it—the finer the child, the better the heart's blood."
"It cannot be; children are no longer butchered, but brought up with care."
"Indeed! how fickle is the world. Three years ago, we were offered more children than we knew what to do with, for four charges of gunpowder or a pint of traders' whiskey."
"That was on the Congo River, in Africa, master."
"I believe so: but it does not matter if the young is black. I remember that what they offered were sprightly, woolly-headed, jolly little urchins."
"Unfortunately we are no longer on the Congo. We are in Paris."
"Well, we can embark from Marseilles and be in Africa in six weeks."
"That can be done; but I must stay in France on serious business."
"Business?" sneered the old man, sending forth a peal of shrill laughter, most lugubrious. "True, I had forgotten that you have political clubs to organize, conspiracies to foster, and, in short, serious business!" And he laughed again forced and false.
Balsamo held his peace, reserving his powers for the storm impending.
"How far has your business advanced?" he inquired, painfully turning in his chair and fixing his large gray eyes on the pupil.
"I have thrown the first stone," he replied, feeling the glance go through him. "The pool is stirred up. The mud is in agitation—the philosophic sediment."
"Yes, you are going to bring into play your utopias, fogs and hollow dreams. These idiots dispute about the existence or non-existence of the Almighty, when they might become little gods themselves. Let us hear who are the famous philosophers whom you have enlisted!"
"I have already the leading poet and the greatest atheist of the age, who will be coming into France presently, to be made a Freemason, in the lodge I am getting up in the old Jesuits' College, Potaufer street. His name is Voltaire."
"I do not know him. The next?"
"I am to be introduced to the greatest sower of ideas of the century, the author of the Social Contract, Rousseau."
"He is not known to me either."
"I expect not, as you only know such old alchemists as Alfonso the Wise, Raymond Lully, Peter of Toledo and Albert the Great."
"Because they are the only men who have really loved a life, sowed ideas that live, and labored at the grand question of to be or not to be."
"There are two ways of living, master."
"I only know of one—existing. But to return to your brace of philosophers. With their help you intend to——"
"Grasp the present and sap the future."
"How stupid they must be in this country to be lured away by ideas."
"No, it is because they have too much brains that they are led by ideas. And then, I have a more powerful help than all the philosophers—the fact that monarchy has lasted sixteen hundred years in France, and the French are tired of it."
"Hence, they are going to overturn the throne, and you are backing them with all your forces! You fool! What good is the upsetting of this monarchy going to do you?"
"It will bring me nothing, at the best, but it will be happiness for others."
"Come, come, I am in a good humor to-day, and can listen to your nonsense. Explain to me how you will obtain the general weal and what it consists of."
"A ministry is in power which is the last rampart defending the monarchy; it is a cabinet, brave, industrious and intelligent, which might sustain this wornout and staggering monarchy for yet twenty years. My aids will overturn it."
"Your philosophers?"
"Oh, no, for they are in favor of the ministry, for its head is a philosopher too."
"Then they are a selfish pack. What great imbeciles!"
"I do not care to discuss what they are, for I do not know," said Balsamo, who was losing his patience. "I only know that they will all cry down the next ministry when this one is destroyed."
"This new cabinet will have against it the philosophers and then the Parliament. They will make such an uproar that the cabinet will persecute the philosophers and block the Parliament. Then in mind and matter will be organized a sullen league, a tenacious, stubborn, restless opposition, which will attack everything, undermining and shaking. Instead of Parliament they will try to rule with judges appointed by the king; they will do everything for their appointer. With reason they will be accused of venality, corruption and injustice. The people will rise, and at last royalty will have arrayed against it philosophy, which is intelligence, Parliament, which is the middle class, and the mob, which is the people; in other words, the lever with which Archimedes can raise the world."
"Well, when you have lifted it, you will have to let it fall again."
"Yes, but when it falls it will smash the royalty."
"To use your figurative language, when this wormeaten monarchy is broken, what will come out of the ruins?"
"Freedom."
"The French be free? Well, then, there will be thirty millions of freemen in France?"
"Yes."
"Among them do you not think there will be one with a bigger brain than another, who will rob them of freedom some fine morning that he may have a larger share than his proper one for himself? Do you not remember a dog we had at Medina which used to eat as much as all the rest together?"
"Yes, and I remember that they all together pitched on him one day and devoured him."
"Because they were dogs; men would have continued to give in to the greediest."
"Do you set the instincts of animals above the intelligence of man?"
"Forsooth, the examples abound by which to prove it. Among the ancients was one Julius Cæsar, and among the moderns one Oliver Cromwell, who ate up the Roman and the English cake, without anybody snatching many crumbs away from them."
"Well, supposing such an usurper comes, he must die some day, being mortal, but before dying he must do good to even those whom he oppressed; for he would have changed the nature of the upper classes. Obliged to have some kind of support, he will choose the popular as the strongest. To the equality which abases, he will oppose the kind which elevates. Equality has no fixed water mark, but takes the level of him who makes it. In raising the lowest classes he will have hallowed a principle unknown before his time. The Revolution will have made the French free; the Protectorate of another Cæsar or Cromwell will have made them equal."
"What a stupid fellow this is!" said Althotas, starting in his chair. "To spend twenty years in bringing up a child so that he shall came and tell you, who taught him all you knew—'Men are equal.' Before the law, maybe;
