“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.”

CHAPTER VIII

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.