Franz stepped toward Monsieur Lebrenn. "I am deeply sensible of these marks of fatherly good-will," he said. "They console me for the rigors of my own father, who has banished me from his presence and forbade me from his states."
"What can have been the cause of such severity!" rejoined the old man in surprise. "What is your crime?"
"My crime?" replied Franz, with a slight smile. "My crime consists in attaching scant weight to our sovereignty. I tried more than once to bring my father to more just, more modest appreciation of our origin. 'Did not our family,' I said to him, 'come into its power through the audacity of an adventurer? May the earth lie light on our ancestor Gaëlo! But he was the companion and pupil of old Rolf, a frightful bandit, who, each spring, came to ravage the banks of the Loire and the Seine.' My father's answer was that all the crowned heads of the world, big or little, were sprung from no less savage a beginning. To which I retorted that there would come the day when the people, enlightened as to the origin of their pretended masters, would tire of being the exploitable property, the forced laborers, the chattels of a few royal families whose founders were fit for the galleys or the gibbet; and that I feared for kings, princes, emperors and Popes lest, by some terrible reversal of things here below, the people, driven to the limit of endurance, should treat them as their august founders deserved, and the most of them to this very day deserve to be treated."
"In good sooth," said John Lebrenn, laughing, "that language was surely severe for a Prince to hold—and to monarchs!"
"So, my dear John, my father grew furious at my language. In fine, I concluded by urging him to set a great example to the other princes of the Germanic Confederation, by laying aside his grand-duchy. 'Lay aside,' I said to him, 'a power stained with crime in its very origin, and lead the people of your states and the other German principalities to unite in a republic like the cantons of the Swiss, or the provinces of the Netherlands. The Poles, the Hungarians, the Moldavians, the Wallachians, enslaved by Prussia, by Russia and by Austria, but trained to republicanism by their old elective customs, will soon be attracted by the example and the cry of liberty! Then the three last powerful despotisms of Europe—Prussia, Austria, and Russia—will find themselves hemmed in, threatened by free peoples, and we shall soon have an end of these last lairs of royalty!'"
"That was preparing for the future!" the old man exclaimed. "The United States of Europe! The Universal Republic!"
"But my father preferred to hang to his throne," continued Franz. "Then convinced of the futility of my appeals, and holding the duty of a citizen in precedence over that of a son, I passed from word to action. With all my power and by every means at my disposal I propagated in Germany, its cradle, the society of the Illuminati; my father banished me."
"Your account of yourself, Monsieur Gerolstein, deepens still more the esteem in which I needs must hold you," nodded the old man.
"These words of regard are doubly precious, Monsieur Lebrenn. They shall add their bonds to those of the relationship already existent between us. It is in the name of those very bonds that I am about to reveal to you one of the motives of my visit—a cordial offer of my services. It is a blood-relation, it is a friend who speaks, Monsieur Lebrenn; do not then, I beg of you, yield to a susceptibility in itself honorable, but perhaps exaggerated. You were a printer. For long your labor provided for the wants of your family. But now you have lost your sight in prison; you are feeble. Madam Lebrenn is old. What are to be your resources against the material needs of existence?"
"My health, thanks to God, is not so weakened that I can no longer work," replied Madam Lebrenn brightly. "The presence of my husband will double my strength."