“‘I do not know,’ I answered, ‘except that it was always so.’
“‘Well, it will be so no longer!’ he cried. ‘We are going to change all that. We are going to reverse things. Monsieur Veto has already sneezed in the sack; the Austrian woman and her whelp will follow him.’
“‘And what then?’ I asked.
“‘Then we shall be free. Then we shall set about the work of establishing liberty, equality, fraternity. But first we will stuff the nobles’ mouths with dust, just as those good fellows at Paris stuffed old Foulon’s with hay. Come, you must join us, Pasdeloup. You also have wrongs to avenge.’
“‘I will think of it,’ I said, and returned to my post at the gate.
“All that night I lay and thought of what Goujon had said, and I confess, M. le Comte, that it appeared to me reasonable. So long as I had imagined that things were as they were because the good God so willed it, I had not questioned them. But now I began to suspect that perhaps the good God had no hand in them at all, and that the only thing left for us was to do what we could to help ourselves. The next night I inquired for Laroche, but no one had seen him; so leaving the gate open—the first time that I had ever done so—I hastened to the Belle Image. Goujon was awaiting me; again he bought wine, and again he laid before me the wrongs of the peasantry. At last I told him that I would join the society which he was organizing at Dange. It was not until I had taken the oath that I discovered what it was he intended to do. He thought me wholly his, and indeed, from night to night, he convinced me more and more that justice was on our side.
“Two nights ago he was for some reason very jubilant and drank more than usual. It was at that time that he confided to me his passion for madame; that he told me what it was he had been doing in that attic at the moment you discovered him. Then he passed on to the plan he had in mind.
“‘We have all the servants now, Pasdeloup,’ he said; ‘even the women. Those we could not persuade we bribed; those we could not bribe we frightened into joining us. The plans are made, everything is ready. Your part will be to open the gates for us.’
“‘Which gates?’ I asked.
“‘The gates of the château, of course.’