“Yes, gentlemen, this sublime advice of Bayard’s mother, which has come down to us in that mellifluous tongue of the middle ages—”
It was at Chambéry this time, in sight of the old Château of Savoy and of that marvellous amphitheatre formed of green hills and snowy mountains which Châteaubriand remembered when he saw Mount Taygetus, that the grand master of the University was speaking, thickly surrounded by embroidered coats, by palm decorations, by orders with ermine, by epaulettes decked with big tassels; there he was, dominating an enormous crowd excited by the power of his will and the gesture of his strong hand that still grasped a little ivory-handled trowel with which he had just spread the mortar for the first stone of the new Lyceum.
“Would that the University of France might speak those words to every one of its boys: ‘Pierre, my friend, I recommend to thee before everything else that....’”
And whilst he quoted those touching words emotion caused his hand, his voice and his broad cheeks to tremble at the memory of that great perfumed room in which, during the agitation caused by a most memorable thunder-storm, the Chambéry speech had been composed.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE VICTIMS.
A morning at ten o’clock. The antechamber at the Ministry of Public Instruction; a long corridor badly lighted, with dark hangings and an oaken wainscot. The gallery is full of a crowd of office-seekers, seated or sauntering about, who from minute to minute become more numerous; each new arrival gives his card to the solemn clerk wearing his chain of office, who receives it, examines and without a word deposits it by his side on the slab of the little table where he is writing; all this in the haggard light from a window dripping from a gentle October rain.
One of the last arrivals, however, has the honor of stirring the august impassiveness of this clerk. He is a great big man, weather-beaten, sunburned and of a tarry aspect, with two little silver anchors in his ears for rings and with the voice of a seal that has caught a cold—just such a voice as one hears in the transparent early morning mists in the seaports of Provence.
“Let him know that it is Cabantous, the pilot—he knows what is up; he expects me.”
“You are not the only one,” answers the clerk, who smiles discreetly at his own joke.