"I am but the mouthpiece of the great Rousseau.

I have so assimilated his thoughts that they come from me as spontaneously as if they were my own, and often I go so far as to delude myself into believing that they are." No better recommendation than this could he have had to the attention of Robespierre, who was himself much in the same case, imbued with and inspired by those doctrines, so ideal in theory, but, alas! so difficult, so impossible in practice.

For fully an hour they sat and talked, and each improved in his liking of the other, until at last, bethinking him of the flight of time, Robespierre announced that he must start.
"You will take him to Paris with you, Maximilien ?" quoth the old pedagogue.
"Ma foi, yes; and if with such gifts as Nature appears to have given him, and such cultivation of them as, through the teachings of Rousseau, he has effected, I do not make something of him, why, then, I am unworthy of the confidence my good friends of Arras repose in me." They made their adieux, and the schoolmaster, opening his door, peered out.

The street was deserted save for de Robespierre's berline and his impatient postillion.

Between them Duhamel and Maximilien assisted Caron to the door of the carriage.