When Marcas had finished the story of his life, intermingled with
reflections, maxims, and observations, revealing him as a great
politician, a few questions and answers on both sides as to the
progress of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us
that he was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily
judged when he can be brought on to the ground of immediate
difficulties: there is a certain Shibboleth for men of superior
talents, and we were of the tribe of modern Levites without belonging
as yet to the Temple. As I have said, our frivolity covered certain
purposes which Juste has carried out, and which I am about to execute.
When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold as it was, to
walk in the Luxembourg gardens till the dinner hour. In the course of
that walk our conversation, grave throughout, turned on the painful
aspects of the political situation. Each of us contributed his
remarks, his comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was
no longer exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal scale just
described by Marcas, the soldier of political warfare. Nor was it the
distressful monologue of the wrecked navigator, stranded in a garret
in the Hotel Corneille; it was a dialogue in which two well-informed
young men, having gauged the times they lived in, were endeavoring,
under the guidance of a man of talent, to gain some light on their own
future prospects.
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