While Ledru Rollin was thus speaking, Louis Blanc entered and quietly approached, courteously saluting his acquaintances on his way, and stopping to exchange a few words with Madame Dantès, who inquired with considerable anxiety for her husband.
"I have this moment left him, Madame," said Louis Blanc. "Be assured, he is safe and well. Ah! how glorious to be an object of solicitude to one like you!" he added, with a smile.
The lady smiled also, and offered an appropriate jest in reply to the gallantry of the distinguished author, as he moved on to join his friends.
"The Ministry provokes its fate!" he said, in a low tone, as he approached. "'Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.' These men suffered seventy reform banquets all over France. The seventy-first one they prohibit, and that, too, by the exhumation of an old despotic edict of 1790. This is exactly what we would have. It was the first, not the last banquet they should have suppressed. Barrot was right to-day, in the Chamber, when he said that had this manifestation been suffered the people would have become tranquil."
"Tranquil, indeed!" cried Ledru Rollin. "That's exactly what we have apprehended! No--no--it is too late! This Reform Banquet was, at first, but an insignificant thing. In it we now recognize the commencement of a revolution. The various announcements and postponements of this banquet have caused an agitation among the masses favorable to our wishes, and the threats and obstinacy of the Ministry have completed the work. The hopes, fears, doubts and disappointments attending this affair have put the mind of all Paris in a ferment, and excited passions of which we may take immediate advantage."
"Aye!" cried Louis Blanc, "we may now do what I have always wished and counseled--we, the Communists, may now take advantage of a movement, in the origin or inception of which we had no hand."
"True, most true!" observed Marrast; "this is the work of the Dynastics--Thiers, Barrot and the rest--the commencement of a reform under the law which we design to make a revolution paramount to all law."
"They begin to fear already that they have gone too far, those discreet men!" said Louis Blanc, smiling bitterly. "Did you observe how they shuffled to-night at M. Barrot's, and finally resolved to abandon the banquet, but, as a sop to the people, pledged themselves to impeach the Ministry?"
"Ah! ha! ha!" laughed Ledru Rollin; "just as if their abandonment of the banquet is to keep the people away from it to-morrow, any more than the Ministerial ordinances! Why, not one man in ten thousand knows of the existence of these manifestoes! But the faubourgs have been promised a holiday for a fortnight past, and they don't intend to be put off again."