CHAPTER XXVIII. FAMILY MATTERS
Let us leave our four hunters on their way to Lagny—where, thanks to the passports they owed to the obligingness of certain clerks in citizen Fouché’s employ, they exchanged their own horses for post-horses and their coachman for a postilion—and see why the First Consul had sent for Roland.
After leaving Morgan, Roland had hastened to obey the general’s orders. He found the latter standing in deep thought before the fireplace. At the sound of his entrance General Bonaparte raised his head.
“What were you two saying to each other?” asked Bonaparte, without preamble, trusting to Roland’s habit of answering his thought.
“Why,” said Roland, “we paid each other all sorts of compliments, and parted the best friends in the world.”
“How does he impress you?”
“As a perfectly well-bred man.”
“How old do you take him to be?”
“About my age, at the outside.”
“So I think; his voice is youthful. What now, Roland, can I be mistaken? Is there a new royalist generation growing up?”