To his astonishment I answered that with some stories, at all events, there was a way; and he forthwith told me the following, in order that the experiment might be tried. I give it in his own words, and call it—
THE GUNS OF THE DUC DE MONTPENSIER.
"Let me begin at the beginning.
"Though I am an old man, you cannot expect my memory to go further back than 1848. But it was I who made the French Revolution of that year. Without me there would have been a revolt; but it was thanks to me—it was thanks to Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski—that the revolt became a revolution.
"I was a young man in those days, twenty years old, a student at the University of Paris. I was tall, with long black hair that flowed over my collar; strong as though my muscles were of whip-cord; a swordsman who, at the salle d'armes, could as often as not disarm the fencing master. And when I was not studying—which was often—I talked politics in the cafés of the Latin quarter. There were those who said—behind my back—that I talked nonsense. They would not have dared to say it to my face; and they knew better afterwards.
"One of my comrades, however, seemed to understand me better than the others. His name was Jacques Durand; and he came to me one day with a proposal.
"'Stromboli,' he whispered in my ear. 'You know that we're trying to get up a revolution?'
"I nodded.
"'You ought to be one of us, Stromboli. You ought to join the Society of the Friends of Revolution.'
"'I never heard of that Society,' I answered.