“The States are traitors.”
“I don’t know anything about that!”
“And you are a traitor yourself!”
“I?”
“Yes, you.”
“Well, as to that, let us understand each other gentlemen. Whom should I betray? The States? Why, I cannot betray them, whilst, being in their pay, I faithfully obey their orders.”
As the Count was so indisputably in the right that it was impossible to argue against him, the mob answered only by redoubled clamour and horrible threats, to which the Count opposed the most perfect urbanity.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “uncock your muskets, one of them may go off by accident; and if the shot chanced to wound one of my men, we should knock over a couple of hundreds of yours, for which we should, indeed, be very sorry, but you even more so; especially as such a thing is neither contemplated by you nor by myself.”
“If you did that,” cried the burghers, “we should have a pop at you, too.”
“Of course you would; but suppose you killed every man Jack of us, those whom we should have killed would not, for all that, be less dead.”