"I assure you, uncle, that I am ashamed. But droll creatures like that respect nothing."
"She has very well shaped limbs," mused the Cardinal, taking his snuff; "she is quite comely, the droll creature. Nevertheless, in the Fifteenth Century, we would have ordered her roasted alive like a little Jewess, in reward for such a joke. But patience. Oh, my friend, never—never before were our chances so favorable!"
"Our chances favorable if the Orleans dynasty is chased away and the Republic is proclaimed?"
The Cardinal again shrugged his shoulders and proceeded to explain:
"Either one thing or the other will happen—either the Republic of the bare-footed mob will be anarchy, the dictatorship, emigration, pillage, paper money, the guillotine, and war with all Europe—and then the thing will last six months at the longest, and Henry V will be brought back triumphantly by the Holy Alliance; or, on the contrary, their Republic will be benign, stupid, legal and moderate with universal suffrage for its foundation—"
"And, if so, uncle?"
"If so, it will last longer, but we shall lose nothing by waiting. Wielding our influence as large landed proprietors, and operating through the lower clergy upon the peasants, we shall become masters at the hustings, obtain the majority in the Chamber, and hamper the passage of every measure that might, I will not say cause the Republic to be loved, but even cause such a revolutionary state of things to seem tolerable. We shall sow the seeds of mistrust and fear in all minds. Soon, with its credit destroyed, with universal ruin, with disaster on all sides, a chorus of curses will rise against the infamous Republic that will then die peaceably after a trial that will for all time disgust the people with it. At that psychologic moment we shall step forward. The hungering people, the bourgeois, frightened out of their senses, will throw themselves at our feet, praying to us with clasped hands for Henry V, the savior of France. Finally, the hour for stipulating conditions will arrive. These will be ours: Royalty, at least such as it existed before 1789, that is, no more bourgeois insolent and clamorous Chamber, holding the reins of government as much as the King, seeing it decides upon appropriations and taxes—an ignominious state of things; an end of the present mongrel system—all or nothing, and we want all, to wit, an absolute King resting upon an omnipotent clergy; a strong aristocracy and a merciless army; a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand foreign troops, if needed; the Holy Alliance will lend them to us. Misery will be so frightful, fear so intense, the general lassitude such, that our conditions will be accepted as soon as imposed. Thereupon we shall take prompt and terrible measures—the only effective ones in such emergencies. Our measures will be these: First of all, provost courts; reinstitution of the laws pronouncing sacrilege and lese majesté capital crimes, and making them retroactive, back to 1830; execution to follow verdict within twenty-four hours, in order to smother in their own poison all revolutionists, all people tainted with impiousness; it will be an era of terror—another St. Bartholomew, if necessary. France will not die under the knife; on the contrary, she is suffering of plethora, she needs a bleeding from time to time.[8] The second measure will be to assign public instruction to the Society of Jesus—it alone is able to emasculate the human species. The third measure will be to break the sheaf of centralization; in it lay the strength of the Revolution; our effort must be, on the contrary, to isolate the provinces as much as possible from the small centers, where, unmolested, we shall hold sway through the lower clergy; or, by virtue of our large holdings, restrain, prevent, if at all possible, the intercommunication of one section of the country with another. It is not helpful to us for people to draw together and meet each other with frequency. With the view of dividing and keeping them divided, we shall assiduously rekindle the rivalries, jealousies, and where needed, the old provincial hatreds. To that end an occasional little douse of civil war will be a helpful expedient. It breeds and nurses the germs of implacable animosity."
The Cardinal stopped a moment to take another pinch of snuff, and then concluded with these words:
"People who are divided by hatred never conspire."
The merciless logic of the priest repelled the Count of Plouernel. Despite his own fatuity and caste prejudices, he rather leaned towards modern thought. No doubt he would have preferred a reign of "legitimate Kings." But he did not stop to think that he who wants the end must not object to the means, and that, in order to be lasting in the eyes of its partisans, a complete and absolute restoration could not possibly take place and maintain itself except by the frightful means that the Cardinal had just laid bare with complacent assurance. The colonel replied with a smile: