“No, for you are the author of his crimes.”
“How! I, who never ceased to inculcate the beauty of virtue? Explain yourself.”
“Alas! if thy pupil did not make this clear to thee last night from his own lips, an angel might come from heaven to preach to thee in vain.”
The old man moved uneasily, and was about to reply, when the relative he had sent for—and who, a native of Nancy, happened to be at Paris at the time—entered the room. He was a man somewhat past thirty, and of a dry, saturnine, meagre countenance, restless eyes, and compressed lips. He listened, with many ejaculations of horror, to his relation’s recital, and sought earnestly, but in vain, to induce him to give information against his protege.
“Tush, tush, Rene Dumas!” said the old man, “you are a lawyer. You are bred to regard human life with contempt. Let any man break a law, and you shout, ‘Execute him!’”
“I!” cried Dumas, lifting up his hands and eyes: “venerable sage, how you misjudge me! I lament more than any one the severity of our code. I think the state never should take away life,—no, not even the life of a murderer. I agree with that young statesman,—Maximilien Robespierre,—that the executioner is the invention of the tyrant. My very attachment to our advancing revolution is, that it must sweep away this legal butchery.”
The lawyer paused, out of breath. The stranger regarded him fixedly and turned pale.
“You change countenance, sir,” said Dumas; “you do not agree with me.”
“Pardon me, I was at that moment repressing a vague fear which seemed prophetic.”
“And that—”