Riquet’s annoyance, to tell the truth, was but slight, and only lasted a few minutes. All was forgiven and forgotten when the man and the dog entered the Josde woods just at the hour when the grass is wet with dew and light mists rise from the hills.
M. Bergeret loved the woods, and at sight of a blade of grass would lose himself in boundless reveries. Riquet, too, loved the woods. As he sniffed at the dead leaves his soul was filled with strange delight. In deep meditation, therefore, they followed the pathway leading to the Carrefour des Demoiselles, when they met a horseman returning to the town. It was M. de Terremondre, the county councillor.
“Good day, M. Bergeret,” he cried, reining in his horse. “Well! Have you thought over my arguments of yesterday?”
He had explained the evening before at Paillot’s the reason why he was against the Jews.
When in the country, especially during the hunting season, M. de Terremondre’s proclivities were anti-Jewish. When in Paris he dined with rich Jews, whom he tolerated to the extent of inducing them to buy pictures at a profit to himself. At County Council meetings, with due consideration to the feelings that were paramount in his county town, he was a Nationalist and an Anti-Semite. But as there were no Jews in that town the anti-Jewish crusade consisted principally in attacks upon the Protestants, who formed a small, austere, and exclusive community of their own.
“So we are enemies,” went on M. de Terremondre. “I am sorry for that, because you are a clever man, but you live quite outside the social movement, and are not mixed up in public life. If you did as I do, and entered into it, your sympathies would be anti-Jewish.”
“You flatter me,” said M. Bergeret. “The Jewish race which peopled Chaldea, Assyria, and Phœnicia in former times, and which founded cities all along the Mediterranean coast, is composed to-day of Jews scattered the world over, and also of the countless Arab populations of Asia and Africa. My heart is not great enough to contain so many hatreds. Old Cadmus was a Jew, but I really couldn’t be the enemy of old Cadmus!”
“You are joking,” replied M. de Terremondre, holding in his horse, who was nibbling at the bushes. “You know as well as I do that the anti-Jewish movement is directed solely against the Jews who have settled in France.”
“Therefore I must hate 80,000 persons,” said M. Bergeret. “That is still too many; I have not the strength for it!”
“No one asks you to hate them,” said M. de Terremondre. “But Jews and Frenchmen cannot live together. The antagonism is ineradicable, it is in the blood.”