Lying the night at a roadside inn, and setting out again early in
the morning, he reached Nantes soon after noon of the following day.
Through that long and lonely ride through the dull plains of
Brittany, now at their dreariest in their winter garb, he had ample
leisure in which to review his actions and his position. From one
who had taken hitherto a purely academic and by no means friendly
interest in the new philosophies of social life, exercising his wits
upon these new ideas merely as a fencer exercises his eye and wrist
with the foils, without ever suffering himself to be deluded into
supposing the issue a real one, he found himself suddenly converted
into a revolutionary firebrand, committed to revolutionary action
of the most desperate kind. The representative and delegate of a
nobleman in the States of Brittany, he found himself simultaneously
and incongruously the representative and delegate of the whole Third
Estate of Rennes.
It is difficult to determine to what extent, in the heat of passion
and swept along by the torrent of his own oratory, he might
yesterday have succeeded in deceiving himself.
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