"Monsieur Count, a few years ago you administered through the cudgels of your lackeys a good dressing down to a man whom I have the unhappiness to possess for brother-in-law. I, in his place, would have paid you back, not by proxy, through hirelings, but in person. Now, great seigneur that you are, what would you have done in that case?"
"Eh! My God, my poor Monsieur Hubert! If I did not, in the first moment of anger, run you through the body with my sword, I would have been under the obligation of asking for a lettre de cachet and sending you to the Bastille."
"Because a man of your birth could not consent to fight a bourgeois?"
"Certainly; for the tribunal composed of our seigneurs the Marshals of France, to which the nobility refers its affairs of honor, would have formally prohibited the duel; and we are bound by oath to respect the decisions of Messieurs the Marshals. For the common herd we have nothing but contempt."
"It seems to me we are wandering singularly astray from the question at stake," interposed the Bishop. "Let us come back to it."
"Not at all, Monsieur Bishop," retorted Hubert. "We must first of all know what we are conspiring for. If we are conspiring to overthrow the Republic, we must know by what regime we shall replace it. Shall it be by an absolute monarchy, as before, or by the constitutional monarchy of 1791? Well, gentlemen of the nobility, gentlemen of the clergy, what we want, we bourgeois, we of the common herd, whom you despise, is the constitutional monarchy. Take that for said."
"So that the bourgeoisie may reign in fact, under the semblance of a kingdom? We reject that sort of a government," sneered Plouernel.
"Naturally."
"Whence it follows that you wish to substitute the bourgeois oligarchy, the privilege of the franc, for our aristocracy?"
"Without a doubt. For we hold in equal aversion both the old regime, that is, the rule of unbridled privilege, and the Republic."