“What! will you really allow me to go with you this evening?”
“Certainly, if it will amuse you. It entirely depends upon yourself.”
“I accept, then, with much pleasure.”
“Our guest is fatigued,” said Madame de Franchi, looking meaningly at her son, as if she felt ashamed Corsica had so far degenerated.
“No, mother, no, he had better come; and when in some Parisian salon people talk of the terrible Vendettas, of the implacable Corsican bandits who strike terror into the hearts of children in Bastia and Ajaccio, he will be able to tell them how things actually are.”
“But what is the great motive for this feud, which, as I understand, is now by your intercession to be for ever extinguished?”
“Oh,” replied Lucien, “in a quarrel it is not the motive that matters, it is the result. If a fly causes a man’s death the man is none the less dead because a fly caused it.”
I saw that he hesitated to tell me the cause of this terrible war, which for the last ten years had desolated the village of Sullacaro.
But, as may be imagined, the more he attempted to conceal it the more anxious I was to discover it.
“But,” said I, “this quarrel must have a motive; is that motive a secret?”