Part 11 (2/2)

”Well, Louis, well,” was the sad answer, ”granting all this, my sacrifices and sufferings are only the more bitter from the fact of having been utterly in vain, entirely useless. You, Louis, have been wiser than I. Your journal is well named 'Bon Sens.'”

”Possibly wiser,” was the reply, ”and possibly less bold. But does not discretion sometimes win what boldness would sacrifice? In rashly struggling for all we sometimes lose all. Prudence and perseverance, my dear Armand, are invaluable.”

CHAPTER X.

THE COMMUNISTS.

At this moment the private door opened, and three men entered the editorial sanctum.

Marrast quickly turned, and his friend was silent.

”Ha! Albert, Flocon, Rollin!” he cried. ”Welcome, welcome! Our friend, Louis Blanc, was just about wasting on me a sermon upon patience, but now he'll have an audience worthy of the subject. Be seated and listen!”

”Patience!” exclaimed Flocon. ”Well, I'm sure we need it.”

”That we do, in our present low estate,” echoed Rollin.

Albert said nothing, but smiled with sarcastic significance.

When the salutations were over and the party, all but Marrast, who restlessly paced the room, were seated, Louis Blanc looked around on his friends with a sad smile, and continued:

”Marrast is right, Messieurs. I was, indeed, preaching patience. I was endeavoring to soothe his irritation and chide his depression with a sermon; since we are all old friends and fellow-sufferers in the good cause and have a common interest in knowing the reasons of failure and the means of triumph, I will by your leave proceed.”

”Aye, dear Louis, go on!” cried Marrast, kindly. ”But you are the most youthful sage I ever listened to.”

”Yes, Louis, proceed; you look like a cure,” said Rollin, laughing.

”I subscribe to Louis Blanc's creed, be it what it may,” added Flocon, briskly.

”And so do I,” said Albert, gravely, in a deep tone.

Of the new visitors, Ledru Rollin was a man of medium stature, about thirty-five years of age and dressed in the extreme of the mode. His complexion and hair were light, his eyes large, blue and protruding, his mouth prominent, and his full cheeks covered with whiskers, which like those of Marrast, were closely trimmed and met beneath his chin. His head and shoulders were thrown back, and his air was bold and independent. He was a lawyer of talent, who had gained celebrity as advocate of the accused on many occasions of State prosecutions.

Flocon was an older man than Rollin, and his countenance bore the wary, vigilant and suspicious look which experience alone gives. He was low in stature, thick-set and close-knit in figure; his eyes seemed always half closed; his brow was broad and ma.s.sive; his face was long; a moustache was on his lip, and his hair was closely cut. The outline of his head and the expression of his face seemed those rather of one born on the banks of the Rhine than on the banks of the Seine, so calm and pa.s.sionless did they appear. His dress was plain but neat. Flocon was the chief editor of ”La Reforme,” the name of which indicates its character. It was this man who, in February, 1833, repressed the violence of his partisans and saved the office of the ”Gazette de France,” yet the very next day published his celebrated letter to the Legitimists, which, for audacity, force and pungency was only equaled by the paralyzing effect it produced. The fines, imprisonments and civil incapacities to which this man had been subjected for a.s.saults upon a government he deemed corrupt, for the ten years preceding, had been literally numberless.

Albert was a man of fifty or more, with a large head, square German face and forehead, a large hazel eye, fixed and unexcitable, hair closely cut, and beard upon his chin and lip. His dress was a long iron-gray frock coat, b.u.t.toned closely to his chin. His face was rather thin, and his complexion bronzed. His name had for years been identified with reform; and though a manufacturer himself, of the cla.s.s of workmen, being proprietor and chief engineer of a large machine factory at Lyons, he had established and sustained in that city a paper to advocate his principles, named ”La Glaneuse,” the prosecution of which by the Government for libel and the fining and imprisonment of its editor formed an originating cause of the revolt in Lyons of April, 1834. For the part played by this man in the revolt thus arising, he was sentenced to transportation, a penalty afterwards commuted to fine and imprisonment. He was a man of few words, remarkably few, but of deep thought and prompt action, and, in moments of crisis and emergency, a man of unshaken and inflexible nerve. To the casual observer, he seemed only a silent man, or a sullen one, astute or stolid; in times of peril he was a man of iron, but a man of action and pa.s.sion, too, moving with resistless might. To rouse his powers, mental or physical, demanded, indeed, circ.u.mstances of unusual import, but once roused they were irresistible.

Such were the personages now a.s.sembled in the office of ”Le National;”

and, of those five men, all were connected with the press, directly, as editor or proprietor, save only Ledru Rollin, and he was a writer for ”La Reforme,” as well as an advocate.

The name of Louis Blanc's paper was, as has been said, ”Le Bon Sens.”

But to return to the narrative.

”And you really wish a sermon from me, old comrades, with patience as the text?”

”Aye--aye--aye!” exclaimed all.

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