“No!” he cried.  “It was an impossible existence!  Watched by the police, watched by the comrades, I did not belong to myself any more!  Why, I could not even go to draw a few francs from my savings-bank without a comrade hanging about the door to see that I didn’t bolt!  And most of them were neither more nor less than housebreakers.  The intelligent, I mean.  They robbed the rich; they were only getting back their own, they said.  When I had had some drink I believed them.  There were also the fools and the mad.  Des exaltes—­quoi!  When I was drunk I loved them.  When I got more drink I was angry with the world.  That was the best time.  I found refuge from misery in rage.  But one can’t be always drunk—­n’est-ce pas, monsieur?  And when I was sober I was afraid to break away.  They would have stuck me like a pig.”

He folded his arms again and raised his sharp chin with a bitter smile.

“By and by they told me it was time to go to work.  The work was to rob a bank.  Afterwards a bomb would be thrown to wreck the place.  My beginner’s part would be to keep watch in a street at the back and to take care of a black bag with the bomb inside till it was wanted.  After the meeting at which the affair was arranged a trusty comrade did not leave me an inch.  I had not dared to protest; I was afraid of being done away with quietly in that room; only, as we were walking together I wondered whether it would not be better for me to throw myself suddenly into the Seine.  But while I was turning it over in my mind we had crossed the bridge, and afterwards I had not the opportunity.”

In the light of the candle end, with his sharp features, fluffy little moustache, and oval face, he looked at times delicately and gaily young, and then appeared quite old, decrepit, full of sorrow, pressing his folded arms to his breast.

As he remained silent I felt bound to ask: 

“Well!  And how did it end?”

“Deportation to Cayenne,” he answered.

He seemed to think that somebody had given the plot away.  As he was keeping watch in the back street, bag in hand, he was set upon by the police.  “These imbeciles,” had knocked him down without noticing what he had in his hand.  He wondered how the bomb failed to explode as he fell.  But it didn’t explode.

“I tried to tell my story in court,” he continued.  “The president was amused.  There were in the audience some idiots who laughed.”

I expressed the hope that some of his companions had been caught, too.  He shuddered slightly before he told me that there were two—­Simon, called also Biscuit, the middle-aged fitter who spoke to him in the street, and a fellow of the name of Mafile, one of the sympathetic strangers who had applauded his sentiments and consoled his humanitarian sorrows when he got drunk in the cafe.

“Yes,” he went on, with an effort, “I had the advantage of their company over there on St. Joseph’s Island, amongst some eighty or ninety other convicts.  We were all classed as dangerous.”