“Michaud,” said Courtecuisse. “Vaudoyer is right, he’s perfectly right. You’ll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won’t be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now they’re there night and day,—demons!”
“Wherever one goes,” said old Mother Tonsard,—who was seventy-eight years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the small-pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,—“wherever one goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if there’s a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they seize the whole bundle, and they say they’ll arrest us. Ha, the villains! there’s no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you’ve got to undo the bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes, kill ‘em, and it won’t ruin France, I tell you.”
“Little Vatel is not so bad,” said Madame Tonsard.
“He!” said Laroche, “he does his business, like the others; when there’s a joke going he’ll joke with you, but you are none the better with him for that. He’s worse than the rest,—heartless to poor folks, like Michaud himself.”
“Michaud has got a pretty wife, though,” said Nicolas Tonsard.
“She’s with young,” said the old woman; “and if this thing goes on there’ll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she calves.”
“Oh! those Arminacs!” cried Marie Tonsard; “there’s no laughing with them; and if you did, they’d threaten to arrest you.”
“You’ve tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?” said Courtecuisse.
“You may bet on that.”
“Well,” said Tonsard with a determined air, “they are men like other men, and they can be got rid of.”