M. de La Tour d’Azyr shook himself out of the gloomy abstraction in which he had sat.  The successor of the deputy he had slain must, in any event, be an object of grim interest to him.  You conceive how that interest was heightened when he heard him named, when, looking across, he recognized indeed in this Andre-Louis Moreau the young scoundrel who was continually crossing his path, continually exerting against him a deep-moving, sinister influence to make him regret that he should have spared his life that day at Gavrillac two years ago.  That he should thus have stepped into the shoes of Lagron seemed to M. de La Tour d’Azyr too apt for mere coincidence, a direct challenge in itself.

He looked at the young man in wonder rather than in anger, and looking at him he was filled by a vague, almost a premonitory, uneasiness.

At the very outset, the presence which in itself he conceived to be a challenge was to demonstrate itself for this in no equivocal terms.

“I come before you,” Andre-Louis began, “as a deputy-suppleant to fill the place of one who was murdered some three weeks ago.”

It was a challenging opening that instantly provoked an indignant outcry from the Blacks.  Andre-Louis paused, and looked at them, smiling a little, a singularly self-confident young man.

“The gentlemen of the Right, M. le President, do not appear to like my words.  But that is not surprising.  The gentlemen of the Right notoriously do not like the truth.”

This time there was uproar.  The members of the Left roared with laughter, those of the Right thundered menacingly.  The ushers circulated at a pace beyond their usual, agitated themselves, clapped their hands, and called in vain for silence.

The President rang his bell.

Above the general din came the voice of La Tour d’Azyr, who had half-risen from his seat:  “Mountebank!  This is not the theatre!”

“No, monsieur, it is becoming a hunting-ground for bully-swordsmen,” was the answer, and the uproar grew.

The deputy-suppleant looked round and waited.  Near at hand he met the encouraging grin of Le Chapelier, and the quiet, approving smile of Kersain, another Breton deputy of his acquaintance.  A little farther off he saw the great head of Mirabeau thrown back, the great eyes regarding him from under a frown in a sort of wonder, and yonder, among all that moving sea of faces, the sallow countenance of the Arras’ lawyer Robespierre — or de Robespierre, as the little snob now called himself, having assumed the aristocratic particle as the prerogative of a man of his distinction in the councils of his country.  With his tip-tilted nose in the air, his carefully curled head on one side, the deputy for Arras was observing Andre-Louis attentively.  The horn-rimmed spectacles he used for reading were thrust up on to his pale forehead, and it was through a levelled spy-glass that he considered the speaker, his thin-lipped mouth stretched a little in that tiger-cat smile that was afterwards to become so famous and so feared.