“It is,” I said, my face clouding again. “I must set out at daybreak.”
“Ungallant man!” she retorted, looking at me with sparkling eyes. “Do you ask a favor only to refuse it? Do you understand what you are saying?”
“Only too well, mademoiselle,” I murmured desolately; “and I would rather have cut off my right hand than utter those words.”
“Still the riddle!” she cried, with a gesture of despair. “Really, monsieur, you weary me. Whatever it is you desire, I advise you to ask for it. One gets nothing in this world without asking—and if it is refused, taking it just the same.”
“But when one may neither ask nor take, mademoiselle?”
“Oh, then,” she retorted, with a shrug of the shoulders, “one is certainly in a bad way. One would better stop desiring;” and she turned her shoulder to me in the most impudent manner possible and gave her attention to M. le Comte.
“It is La Vendée which will re-establish monarchy in France,” he was saying, his face alight. “Those peasants are unconquerable. There are two hundred thousand of them, peaceful men, tilling the soil, tending their herds, as they had always done, with no thought of resisting the Republic until the Republic attempted to take from them their priests and to draft them forth to fight on the frontiers. Then they rose as one man, fell upon their oppressors, routed them, cut them to pieces among the hedges. Now they are back in their homes again to make their Easter; that over, they will march against Thouars and Saumur.”
“But, M. le Comte,” I protested, forgetting for a moment my own troubles in the interest of the narrative, “fighting of that sort can be successful only near home and in a most favorable country. For a campaign troops must have organization.”
“That is true, my friend,” he agreed. “Well, these troops are being organized. Once the Bocage is free of the Blues, which will be within the month, our army will be ready to cross the Loire, take Nantes, advance through Brittany, Normandy, and Maine, where we shall be well received, and at last march at the head of a united north-west against Paris itself! I tell you, Tavernay, the Republic is doomed!”
His eyes were sparkling, his face flushed with excitement. An electric shock seemed to run around the board, and madame sprang to her feet, glass in hand.