"If he truly loved you, he would not risk causing you the greatest chagrin, and compromising me into the bargain!"
"My friend, I can not listen to reproaches against my brother, when he is exposed to such grave perils—"
"And whose fault is it, if not his own, due to his own violent and obstinate character? He abhors, says he, the excesses of the Revolution! Alas, I also execrate them—yet I feign to applaud them. That will at least do to insure our repose and steer clear of the guillotine. Thus, to-morrow, the members of the Convention will hale before the bar the unfortunate Louis XVI, he will be examined in due form, they will give him his trial, and he will be condemned to death. And well, I shall vote for death."
"O, my God!" murmured Madam Desmarais in cold fear. "My husband a regicide!"
"But how can I escape the fatal necessity?"
"Let the fatality fall, then!" answered Madam Desmarais mournfully, her voice broken with sobs.
"Let us go on," said advocate Desmarais after a long silence, during which his agitation slowly got the better of itself, "let us go on. Our daughter is then still infatuated with this Lebrenn?"
"She loves Lebrenn as much as, if not more than, before. He informed her in one of his last letters that he had been promoted to certain duties in the Commune of Paris, and she glories in his advancement."
"In truth, the workingman has been elected a municipal officer. They even proposed to him, such is his influence in the quarter and in the Jacobin Club, to run as candidate for the Convention, but he declined the offer. For the rest, his position with the Jacobins has put him in touch with several leading spirits of the Revolution—Tallien, Robespierre, Legendre, Billaud-Varenne, Danton, and other rabid democrats."
"Have you renewed your relations with the young man since the day you refused him our daughter's hand?"