Meanwhile together with the change in his fortune had come a change in his position towards the law, a change brought about by the other changes wrought around him.  No longer need he hide himself.  Who in these days would prefer against him the grotesque charge of sedition for what he had done in Brittany?  What court would dare to send him to the gallows for having said in advance what all France was saying now?  As for that other possible charge of murder, who should concern himself with the death of the miserable Binet killed by him — if, indeed, he had killed him, as he hoped — in self-defence.

And so one fine day in early August, Andre-Louis gave himself a holiday from the academy, which was now working smoothly under his assistants, hired a chaise and drove out to Versailles to the Café d’Amaury, which he knew for the meeting-place of the Club Breton, the seed from which was to spring that Society of the Friends of the Constitution better known as the Jacobins.  He went to seek Le Chapelier, who had been one of the founders of the club, a man of great prominence now, president of the Assembly in this important season when it was deliberating upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Le Chapelier’s importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the representative.

M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends.  The waiter desired to serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M. le Depute found himself.

Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the attempt.  Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out over the wide tree-encircled square.  There, in that common-room of the café, deserted at this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him.  Less than a year ago he had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate leadership; to-day he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the Nation in travail, and Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the general mass.

The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each noting in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought.  In Le Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that went with certain subtler refinements of countenance.  He was thinner than of old, his face was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered his visitor through a gold-rimmed spy-glass.  In Andre-Louis those jaded but quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked.  The almost constant swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a grace of movement, a poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of command.  He seemed taller by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an elegance which if quiet was none the less rich.  He wore a small silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to it, and his black hair that Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks was glossy now and gathered into a club.  Almost he had the air of a petit-maitre.