"And what do you say of your mother?"
"I say—"
"What?"
"I say she is dead."
"You do right; it is as if I were, for I renounce you, dastard! Your brother is at the galleys; your grandfather and your father finished their lives daringly on the scaffold, mocking the priest and the executioner! Instead of avenging them you tremble!"
"Yes, by showing yourself a real Martial, spitting at the headsman's knife and the red cassock, and ending like father, mother, brother, sister—"
Accustomed as he was to the savage excitement of his mother, Martial could not forbear shuddering. The countenance of the widow as she uttered the last words was fearful. She continued, with increasing wrath:
"Oh, coward! and even worse than coward! You wish to be honest! Honest? Why, won't you ever be despised, repulsed, as the son of an assassin or the brother of a felon? But you, instead of rousing your revenge and wrath, this makes you frightened! Instead of biting, you run away! When they guillotined your father, you left us,—coward! And you knew we could not leave the island to go into the city, because they call after us, and pelt us with stones, like mad dogs. Oh, they shall pay for it, I can tell you,—they shall pay for it!"
"A man?—ten men would not make me afraid! But to be called after by all the world as the son and brother of criminals! Well, I could not endure it. I preferred going into the woods and poaching with Pierre, who sells game."