'No grub, no fighting,' declared Chouteau; 'I'll be blowed if I risk my skin to-day!'
This big, lanky house-painter, this fine speechifier from Montmartre, this public-house theorist who marred the few reasonable ideas that he had picked up here and there, by blending them with a frightful mixture of trash and lies, was again showing himself in the colours of a revolutionist. 'Besides,' continued he, 'haven't they played the fool with us, telling us that the Prussians were dying of hunger and illness, that they hadn't even got any shirts left, and were to be met on the roads grimed with dirt and as tattered as paupers?'
This made Loubet laugh, like the gamin he was whose life had been spent amid all the hole-and-corner avocations of the Paris markets.
'But it's all rot,' continued Chouteau, 'it's we who are kicking the bucket, dying of misery, with our shoes full of holes and our clothes so ragged that anyone might be tempted to give us a copper out of charity. And then too those big victories! Ah! the humbugs, to tell us that they had taken Bismarck prisoner and knocked a whole army head over heels into a stone quarry. Ah! they have played the fool with us and no mistake.'
Pache and Lapoulle listened, clenching their fists and nodding their heads with an air of fury. Others also were enraged, for the everlasting lies of the Paris newspapers had ended by having a disastrous effect. Confidence was dead; no belief remained in anything. The minds of these big children, at the outset so fertile in extraordinary hopes, were now filled with maddening nightmares.
'Of course, and it's simple enough,' resumed Chouteau. 'It's easily understood since we've been sold—you fellows know it as well as I do.'
Every time that he heard this, Lapoulle in his childish simplicity felt quite exasperated. 'Sold, eh?' said he. 'Ah! what rogues some people are.'
'Yes, sold like Judas sold his Master,' muttered Pache, his mind always full of biblical reminiscences.
Chouteau was triumphing: 'It's simple enough,' said he, 'everyone knows the figures. MacMahon was paid three millions of francs, and the generals had a million apiece to bring us here. It was all settled in Paris last spring; and a rocket was sent up last night as a signal that all was ready, and that the others could come and take us.'
The arrant stupidity of this invention revolted Maurice. Chouteau had formerly amused him, almost won him over by his Parisian 'go;' but for some time past he had been unable to stomach this perverter, this ne'er-do-well, who railed at everything so as to disgust the others. 'Why do you tell such absurd stories?' he exclaimed; 'you know very well there's no truth in it at all.'