This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of slaughtering them without pity.
“I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed there,” said Bonnebault. “We were marched out, and the peasants were cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they’ve a right, they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!”
“Well, well,” said Tonsard, “what is there in all that to frighten you like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put ‘em in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can’t imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the king’s expense than they are at their own; and they’re kept warmer, too.”
“You are a pack of fools!” roared Fourchon. “Better gnaw at the bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you’ll get your backs broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,—that’s another thing! You don’t work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you don’t have your liberty.”
“Perhaps it would be well,” said Vaudoyer, who was among the more valiant in counsel, “if some of us risked our skins to deliver the neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the gate of the Avonne.”
“Do Michaud’s business for him?” said Nicolas; “I’m good for that.”
“Things are not ripe for it,” said old Fourchon. “We should risk too much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us, and you’ll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning.”
“You are all blind moles,” shouted Tonsard, “let ‘em pick a quarrel with their law and their troops, they can’t put the whole country in irons, and we’ve plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the old lords who’ll sustain us.”
“That’s true,” said Courtecuisse; “none of the other land-owners complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside myself.”
“They won’t call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in the district against him,” said Godain. “The fault’s his own; he tried to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government will just say to him, ‘Hush up.’”