"It is precisely because you are an old servant of my family, François Bouillot, and because you are giving me at this moment a proof of unbounded devotion, that I believe myself obliged to tell you the motives for this refusal, which has so many reasons to surprise you. Listen to me, then."
"As you insist, my lord, I obey you."
"Very good, take a chair, and place yourself here by my side, as it is unnecessary for others beside yourself to hear what I am going to say."
The exempt took a stool and seated himself by his master's side, exactly as the latter had ordered, while still keeping up a respectful distance between himself and the gentleman.
"In the first place," the Count resumed, "be thoroughly convinced that if I refuse your offer, it is not through any motive of a personal nature as regards yourself. I have full confidence in you, for nearly 200 years your family has been attached to mine, and we have ever had reason to praise their devotion to our interest. This important point being settled, I will go on. I will suppose for a moment that the plan you have formed is successful, a plan which I will not discuss, although it appears to me very difficult to execute, and the slightest accident might, at the last moment, compromise its issue. What will happen? Forced to fly without resources, without friends, I should not only be unable to take the revenge I meditate upon my enemies, but surrendered, so to speak, to their mercy, I should speedily fall into their hands again, and thus become the laughing stock of those whom I hate. I should be dishonoured; they will despise me, and I shall have but one way of escape from a life henceforth rendered useless, as all my plans would be overthrown, and that is blowing out my brains."
"Oh! my lord!" Bouillot exclaimed, clasping his hands.
"I do not wish to fall," the Count continued imperturbably, "in the terrible struggle which has this day begun between my enemies and myself. I have taken an oath, and that oath I will keep, regardless of the consequences. I am young, hardly twenty-five years of age; up to the present, life has only been one long joy for me, and I have succeeded in everything, plans of ambition, fortune and love. Today misfortune has come to lay its hand on me, and it is welcome; for the man who has not suffered is not a perfect man; grief purifies the mind and tempers the heart. Solitude is a good councillor; it makes a man comprehend the nothingness of small things, expands the ideas, and prepares grand conceptions. I require to steel myself through sorrow, in order to be able one day to repay my enemies a hundredfold all that I have suffered at their hands. It is by thinking over my broken career and my ruined future, that I shall find the necessary strength to accomplish my vengeance. When my heart is dead to every other feeling but that of the hatred which will entirely occupy it, I shall be able pitilessly to trample underfoot all those who today laugh at me and believe they have crushed me, because they have hurled me down; and then I shall be really a man, and woe to those who try to measure their strength with mine. You tremble at what I am saying to you at this moment, my old servant," he added more gently, "what would it be were you able to read in my heart all the hatred, auger, and rage it contains against those who have mercilessly ground me beneath their heel, and who have eternally deprived me of happiness, in order to satisfy the paltry calculations of a narrow and criminal ambition?"
"Oh, my lord Count! Permit an old servant of your family, a man who is entirely devoted to you, to implore you to resign these fearful schemes of vengeance. Alas! You will be the first victim of your hatred."
"Have you forgotten, Bouillot," the Count replied ironically, "what is said in our country, about the members of the family to which I have the honor of belonging?"
"Yes, yes, my lord," he said with a melancholy shake of the head; "I remember it, and will repeat it if you wish."