him to do as he pleased, saying that the whole house was at his service.  Logre also manifested great friendship for him, and even constituted himself his lieutenant.  He was constantly discussing affairs with him, rendering an account of the steps he was supposed to take, and furnishing the names of newly affiliated associates.  Logre, indeed, had now assumed the duties of organiser; on him rested the task of bringing the various plotters together, forming the different sections, and weaving each mesh of the gigantic net into which Paris was to fall at a given signal.  Florent meantime remained the leader, the soul of the conspiracy.

However, much as the hunchback seemed to toil, he attained no appreciable result.  Although he had loudly asserted that in each district of Paris he knew two or three groups of men as determined and trustworthy as those who met at Monsieur Lebigre’s, he had never yet given any precise information about them, but had merely mentioned a name here and there, and recounted stories of endless alleged secret expeditions, and the wonderful enthusiasm that the people manifested for the cause.  He made a great point of the hand-grasps he had received.  So-and-so, whom he thou’d and thee’d, had squeezed his fingers and declared he would join them.  At the Gros Caillou a big, burly fellow, who would make a magnificent sectional leader, had almost dislocated his arm in his enthusiasm; while in the Rue Popincourt a whole group of working men had embraced him.  He declared that at a day’s notice a hundred thousand active supporters could be gathered together.  Each time that he made his appearance in the little room, wearing an exhausted air, and dropping with apparent fatigue on the bench, he launched into fresh variations of his usual reports, while Florent duly took notes of what he said, and relied on him to realise his many promises.  And soon in Florent’s pockets the plot assumed life.  The notes were looked upon as realities, as indisputable facts, upon which the entire plan of the rising was constructed.  All that now remained to be done was to wait for a favourable opportunity, and Logre asserted with passionate gesticulations that the whole thing would go on wheels.

Florent was at last perfectly happy.  His feet no longer seemed to tread the ground; he was borne aloft by his burning desire to pass sentence on all the wickedness he had seen committed.  He had all the credulity of a little child, all the confidence of a hero.  If Logre had told him that the Genius of Liberty perched on the Colonne de Juillet[*] would have come down and set itself at their head, he would hardly have expressed any surprise.  In the evenings, at Monsieur Lebigre’s, he showed great enthusiasm and spoke effusively of the approaching battle, as though it were a festival to which all good and honest folks would be invited.  But although Gavard in his delight began to play with his revolver, Charvet got more snappish than ever, and sniggered and shrugged his shoulders.  His rival’s assumption of the leadership angered him extremely; indeed, quite disgusted him with politics.  One evening when, arriving early, he happened to find himself alone with Logre and Lebigre, he frankly unbosomed himself.