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148 When it was over and the garrison band, at the head of the torchlight procession, took up, as they began to march, the principal theme of the cantata, Laurent, tingling to his very marrow, his nerves coursing with an indefinable and contagious enthusiasm, momentarily beside himself, locked step with the soldiers and pushed on with the equally enthusiastic and excited mob in which bourgeois and workmen, entangled arm in arm, struck up in full voice the dithyrambic chant.

Tirelessly Laurent marched with the procession over the whole of its route.

The flowing escort renewed itself with fresh relays at every corner, but in vain, for in his intense excitement he could not bring himself to leave it. Vyveloy's music would have carried him to the end of the world. Although others were used up by the heroic measures of the torchlight procession and disappeared in the cross streets, he was conscious of an even-increasing intrepidity in his legs and flame in his heart. New marchers, however, were always replacing those who had dropped out, and the character of the procession varied with the quarters that it traversed. Along the roadstead and the basins Laurent felt the elbows of sailors and dockers; in the heart of the city he became one of a crowd of salesmen and shop girls; on the boulevards of the new city he found himself again with young men of good family and the clerks of the largest firms; finally, in the labyrinths of the Quartier Saint Andre, the habitation of the beggars, waifs and strays, bareheaded wantons took his arm familiarly, and tawny young blackguards, perhaps runners, carried him off in their farandole. All for Antwerp, all for Reubens. Laurent heard only the cantata; he was filled and