Thus Andre-Louis to himself in his self-contempt.  And whilst he trifled away his time and played Scaramouche, and centred all his hopes in presently becoming the rival of such men as Chenier and Mercier, M. de La Tour d’Azyr went his proud ways unchallenged and wrought his will.  It was idle to tell himself that the seed he had sown was bearing fruit.  That the demands he had voiced in Nantes for the Third Estate had been granted by M. Necker, thanks largely to the commotion which his anonymous speech had made.  That was not his concern or his mission.  It was no part of his concern to set about the regeneration of mankind, or even the regeneration of the social structure of France.  His concern was to see that M. de La Tour d’Azyr paid to the uttermost liard for the brutal wrong he had done Philippe de Vilmorin.  And it did not increase his self-respect to find that the danger in which Aline stood of being married to the Marquis was the real spur to his rancour and to remembrance of his vow.  He was — too unjustly, perhaps — disposed to dismiss as mere sophistries his own arguments that there was nothing he could do; that, in fact, he had but to show his head to find himself going to Rennes under arrest and making his final exit from the world’s stage by way of the gallows.

It is impossible to read that part of his “Confessions” without feeling a certain pity for him.  You realize what must have been his state of mind.  You realize what a prey he was to emotions so conflicting, and if you have the imagination that will enable you to put yourself in his place, you will also realize how impossible was any decision save the one to which he says he came, that he would move, at the first moment that he perceived in what direction it would serve his real aims to move.

It happened that the first person he saw when he took the stage on that Thursday evening was Aline; the second was the Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr.  They occupied a box on the right of, and immediately above, the stage.  There were others with them — notably a thin, elderly, resplendent lady whom Andre-Louis supposed to be Madame la Comtesse de Sautron.  But at the time he had no eyes for any but those two, who of late had so haunted his thoughts.  The sight of either of them would have been sufficiently disconcerting.  The sight of both together very nearly made him forget the purpose for which he had come upon the stage.  Then he pulled himself together, and played.  He played, he says, with an unusual nerve, and never in all that brief but eventful career of his was he more applauded.

That was the evening’s first shock.  The next came after the second act.  Entering the green-room he found it more thronged than usual, and at the far end with Climene, over whom he was bending from his fine height, his eyes intent upon her face, what time his smiling lips moved in talk, M. de La Tour d’Azyr.  He had her entirely to himself, a privilege none of the men of fashion who were in the habit of visiting the coulisse had yet enjoyed.  Those lesser gentlemen had all withdrawn before the Marquis, as jackals withdraw before the lion.