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.
But since the established order of things in France was such as to make a rampart for M.de La Tour d'Azyr, affording him complete immunity for this and any other crimes that it pleased him to commit, why, then the established order must take the consequences of its wrong-doing.

Therein he perceived his clear justification.
And so it was without misgivings that he came on his errand of sedition into that beautiful city of Nantes, rendered by its spacious streets and splendid port the rival in prosperity of Bordeaux and Marseilles.
He found an inn on the Quai La Fosse, where he put up his horse, and where he dined in the embrasure of a window that looked out over the tree-bordered quay and the broad bosom of the Loire, on which argosies of all nations rode at anchor.

The sun had again broken through the clouds, and shed its pale wintry light over the yellow waters and the tall-masted shipping.
Along the quays there was a stir of life as great as that to be seen on the quays of Paris.

Foreign sailors in outlandish garments and of harsh-sounding, outlandish speech, stalwart fishwives with baskets of herrings on their heads, voluminous of petticoat above bare legs and bare feet, calling their wares shrilly and almost inarticulately, watermen in woollen caps and loose trousers rolled to the knees, peasants in goatskin coats, their wooden shoes clattering on the round kidney-stones, shipwrights and labourers from the dockyards, bellows-menders, rat-catchers, water-carriers, ink-sellers, and other itinerant pedlars.