"You can see for yourself, since monsieur has driven in himself and is using the whip and wearing boots of the deceased."
Jean-Louis threw one terrified glance at the whip and the boots and then he set off at a tearing gallop, without saying another word.
"Oh! my poor horses," Labbé shouted after us, "they are going to have a bad time of it."
We reached Villers-Cotterets under the hour, and here quite an ovation awaited me. I had hardly given my name to the first person I met whom I knew, than the news of my arrival by post-conveyance in a trap surmounted by a tricolour flag flew all over the town as rapidly as though it had been sent on telegraph wires. As the news spread, the houses turned out the living with as great unanimity as the tombs will discharge the dead at the sound of the Last Trump. All these living beings ran to the posting-house and reached it as soon as I did. Much explanation had to be given to make them understand my costume, my rifle, my sunburnt condition, the trap, the tricolour flag and why Bard and Cartier were with me. Everybody in that beloved countryside loved me well enough to have the right to put these questions to me. I answered them all, and when the explanations were given, they cried in unison—
"Don't go to Soissons! Soissons is a Royalist town!"
But it scarcely need be said that I had not come as far as Villers-Cotterets without intending to proceed to Soissons.
"I not only intend to go to Soissons," I replied, "but I shall do all in my power to reach it before eleven o'clock, even if I have to give twenty francs in tips to the postillions."
"If you offer them forty, you will not reach there in time," said a voice I knew; "but you will get there by midnight, and they will let you enter."
The voice belonged to one of my friends who lived at Soissons, the one who, fifteen years previously, when a child like myself, came, an hour before me, to make a suggestion to General Lallemand when a prisoner, similar to the one I put to him an hour later.
"Ah! is that you, Hutin?" I exclaimed. "What shall I do to get in?"