.. pish! Orleans himself may desire it, but
the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can't. The phrase
is Mirabeau's."
He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.
"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he
complained. "You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you
represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld
from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled
in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might
have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me
of it."
Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you
know that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the
robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What
will be the end of you, I wonder?"
"The gallows, probably."
"Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial
France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so."
"The surest way to the gallows of all," laughed Andre-Louis.
At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience.
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