This was a declaration of war, for it was clear that Pitou had put the abbe out of temper.
“Hello! why do you call me a Revolutionist? do you think I have turned the state over all by myself?”
“You are hand and glove with those who did it.”
“Father, every man is free in his mind,” returned Pitou. “I do not say it in Latin for I have improved in that tongue since I quitted your school. Those whom I frequent and at whom you sneer, talk it like their own and they would think the way you taught it to be faulty.”
“My Latin faulty?” repeated the pedagogue, visibly wounded by the ex-pupil’s manner. “How comes it that you never spoke up in this style when you were under my—whip—that is, roof?”
“Because you brutalized me then,” responded Pitou: “your despotism trampled on my wits, and liberty could not lay hold of my speech. You treated me like a fool, whereas all men are equal.”
“I will never suffer anybody to utter such rank blasphemy before me,” cried the irritated schoolmaster. “You the equal of one whom nature and heaven have taken sixty years to form? never!”
“Ask General Lafayette, who has proclaimed the Rights of Man.”
“What, do you quote as an authority that traitor, that firebrand of all discord, that bad subject of the King?”
“It is you who blaspheme,” retaliated the peasant: “you must have been buried for the last three months. This bad subject is the very one who most serves the King. This torch of discord is the pledge of public peace. This traitor is the best of Frenchmen.”