“As for the backing of a family, that element is particularly lacking,” replied Bixiou; “in fact, in his case, it is conspicuously absent.”

“Really?” said Emile Blondet.  “Is he a natural child?”

“Nothing could be more natural,—­father and mother unknown.  But I believe, myself, that he can be elected.  It is the ins and outs of his political ideas that will be the wonder.”

“He is a republican, I suppose, if he is a friend of those ‘National’ gentlemen, and resembles Danton?”

“Yes, of course; but he despises his co-religionists, declaring they are only good for carrying a point, and for violence and bullying.  Provisionally, he is satisfied with a monarchy hedged in by republican institutions; but he insists that our civic royalty will infallibly be lost through the abuse of influence, which he roughly calls corruption.  This will lead him towards the little Church of the Left-centre; but there again—­for there’s always a but—­he finds only a collection of ambitious minds and eunuchs unconsciously smoothing the way to a revolution, which he, for his part, sees looming on the horizon with great regret, because, he says, the masses are too little prepared, and too little intelligent, not to let it slip through their fingers.  Legitimacy he simply laughs at; he doesn’t admit it to be a principle in any way.  To him it is simply the most fixed and consistent form of monarchical heredity; he sees no other superiority in it than that of old wine over new.  But while he is neither legitimist, nor conservative, nor Left-centre, and is republican without wanting a republic, he proclaims himself a Catholic, and sits astride the hobby of that party, namely,—­liberty of education.  But this man, who wants free education for every one, is afraid of the Jesuits; and he is still, as in 1829, uneasy about the encroachments of the clergy and the Congregation.  Can any of you guess the great party which he proposes to create in the Chamber, and of which he intends to be the leader?  That of the righteous man, the impartial man, the honest man! as if any such thing could live and breathe in the parliamentary cook-shops; and as if, moreover, all opinions, to hide their ugly nothingness, had not, from time immemorial, wrapped themselves in that banner.”

“Does he mean to renounce sculpture absolutely?” asked Joseph Bridau.

“Not yet; he is just finishing the statue of some saint, I don’t know which; but he lets no one see it, and says he does not intend to send it to the Exhibition this year—­he has ideas about it.”

“What ideas?” asked Emile Blondet.

“Oh! that religious works ought not to be delivered over to the judgment of critics, or to the gaze of a public rotten with scepticism; they ought, he thinks, to go, without passing through the uproar of the world, piously and modestly to the niches for which they are intended.”

“Ah ca!” exclaimed Emile Blondet, “and it is this fervent Catholic who fights a duel!”