“My friends,” he said, slowly, “I
am deeply sensible of the honour that you do me.
But in accepting it I should be usurping an honour
that rightly belongs elsewhere. Who could represent
us better, who more deserving to be our representative,
to speak to our friends of Nantes with the voice of
Rennes, than the champion who once already to-day
has so incomparably given utterance to the voice of
this great city? Confer this honour of being
your spokesman where it belongs — upon Andre-Louis
Moreau.”
Rising in response to the storm of applause that greeted
the proposal, Andre-Louis bowed and forthwith yielded.
“Be it so,” he said, simply. “It
is perhaps fitting that I should carry out what I
have begun, though I too am of the opinion that Le
Chapelier would have been a worthier representative.
I will set out to-night.”
“You will set out at once, my lad,” Le
Chapelier informed him, and now revealed what an uncharitable
mind might account the true source of his generosity.
“It is not safe after what has happened for
you to linger an hour in Rennes. And you must
go secretly. Let none of you allow it to be
known that he has gone. I would not have you
come to harm over this, Andre-Louis. But you
must see the risks you run, and if you are to be spared
to help in this work of salvation of our afflicted
motherland, you must use caution, move secretly, veil
your identity even. Or else M. de Lesdiguieres
will have you laid by the heels, and it will be good-night
for you.”
OMNES OMNIBUS
Andre-Louis rode forth from Rennes committed to a
deeper adventure than he had dreamed of when he left
the sleepy village of Gavrillac. Lying the night
at a roadside inn, and setting out again early in
the morning, he reached Nantes soon after noon of the
following day.
Through that long and lonely ride through the dull
plains of Brittany, now at their dreariest in their
winter garb, he had ample leisure in which to review
his actions and his position. From one who had
taken hitherto a purely academic and by no means friendly
interest in the new philosophies of social life, exercising
his wits upon these new ideas merely as a fencer exercises
his eye and wrist with the foils, without ever suffering
himself to be deluded into supposing the issue a real
one, he found himself suddenly converted into a revolutionary
firebrand, committed to revolutionary action of the
most desperate kind. The representative and delegate
of a nobleman in the States of Brittany, he found
himself simultaneously and incongruously the representative
and delegate of the whole Third Estate of Rennes.
It is difficult to determine to what extent, in the
heat of passion and swept along by the torrent of
his own oratory, he might yesterday have succeeded
in deceiving himself. But it is at least certain
that, looking back in cold blood now he had no single
delusion on the score of what he had done. Cynically
he had presented to his audience one side only of
the great question that he propounded.
