“Ask Sibilet; the answer is in his line, he likes to make you angry,” said Michaud, with a pained look. “But—if you will have an answer—well, that’s a nickname these brigands have given you, general.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means, general—well, it refers to your father.”
“Ha! the curs!” cried the count, turning livid. “Yes, Michaud, my father was a shopkeeper, an upholsterer; the countess doesn’t know it. Oh! that I should ever—well! after all, I have waltzed with queens and empresses. I’ll tell her this very night,” he cried, after a pause.
“They also call you a coward,” continued Michaud.
“Ha!”
“They ask how you managed to save yourself at Essling when nearly all your comrades perished.”
The accusation brought a smile to the general’s lips. “Michaud, I shall go at once to the Prefecture!” he cried, with a sort of fury, “if it is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for. Let Madame la comtesse know that I have gone. Ha, ha! they want war, do they? Well, they shall have it; I’ll take my pleasure in thwarting them,—every one of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their peasantry! We are in the enemy’s country, therefore prudence! Tell the foresters to keep within the limits of the law. Poor Vatel, take care of him. The countess is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of all this; otherwise I could never get her to come back here.”
Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril. Michaud had been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the enemy’s power, though he saw its action. The general, for his part, believed in the supremacy of the law.
The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has not the virtue we attribute to it. It strikes unequally; it is so modified in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes its own principles. This fact may be noted more or less distinctly throughout all ages. Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert that the decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced throughout France?—for instance, that the requisitions of the Convention for men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in the depths of Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at the great centres of social life? What philosopher dares deny that a head falls to-day in such or such department, while in a neighboring department another head stays on its shoulders though guilty of a crime identically the same, and often more horrible? We ask for equality in life, and inequality reigns in law and in the death penalty!