"We are saved!" he said to Mario in the hall. "She did not betray me, and she has given orders to let us go."
And the marquis, in his innocence, walked with Mario toward the kitchen door; but he was much mistaken: La Proserpine had, on the contrary, issued even stricter orders for the blockade.
So they had no choice but to continue to busy themselves with the composition of the famous omelette aux pistaches.
About an hour passed without any perceptible change in this absurd yet tragical situation.
There was a great uproar in the dining-room. Macabre was shouting and swearing and singing. There were alternations of brutal merriment and brutal rage.
This is what was taking place:
Lieutenant Saccage was as outspoken and concise as his name. It seemed ridiculous to him to prepare for a sharp and decisive blow, which demanded a swift and silent march, by a supper which he well knew would degenerate into a carouse.
Macabre was a desperado addicted to all the excesses which were the real motive of his expeditions. He had not, like his lieutenant, the qualities of the shrewd speculator, and, if I were not afraid of profaning words, I would say that, in his adventurous life, he wallowed in a sort of drunkenness, which was the poetry, a sombre and brutish sort of poetry, of that life. He was as much gypsy as thief, squandering all he acquired, and rich only by fits and starts.
The other amassed wealth in cold blood and put it aside. He understood business, spent nothing in dissipation, and was hoarding a fortune. In our day he would have been a sharper in higher station; he would have cheated in a black coat and lived in good society, instead of scouring the high roads and stripping wayfarers.
Each century has its own peculiar methods of traffic, and during the civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brigandage was a regular branch of industry, conducted on business principles.