“Ah! si fait vraiment. That is to tell my past condition of poverty, not my fortune.”
“The rest shall come. Observe my fitness for my post. You are from the forests of Nontron.”
He started and stared.
“Truly I have no love for spies,” he muttered, dismayed.
It was my turn to laugh. I had hazarded a bold guess. That he was from the woods rather than from the Landes his gift of seeing through the darkness convinced me. Then, if from the woods, why not from that part of the province where they stretched thickest and most meet for his trade?
“Now,” said I, “for what follows. It comes to your ears that Guienne is hatching a fine breed of maggots from the carcasses of dead aristocrats; that there is a feast of rich fragments toward. You will have your share; you will eat of these aristocrats that have so long fed on you. That is a very natural resolve. But in a Republic of maggots, as in all other communities, there is always a proportion of the brood that will fatten unduly at the expense of its fellows. These despots by constitution appropriate the most succulent parts; they wax thick and strong, and, finally, they alone of the swarm hatch out into flies, while the rest perish undeveloped.”
“It is a cursed parable,” he said, sullenly. “I do not comprehend you.”
“I speak of the people, my friend—of whom you are not one that will fatten.”
“And why, and why?”
“You have scruples. You decry at the outset the methods of this select clique of the Republic that has the instinct to prosper. If I congratulate you on the possession of a conscience, I must deplore in anticipation the sacrifice of yet another martyr to that truism which history repeats as often as men forget it.”