“There are only twenty general officers selected to be made an example of. Twenty. A round number. And let’s see, Feraud. . . . Ah, he’s there. Gabriel Florian. Parfaitement. That’s your man. Well, there will be only nineteen examples made now.”
General D’Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an infectious illness. “I must beg your Excellency to keep my interference a profound secret. I attach the greatest importance to his never learning . . .”
“Who is going to inform him, I should like to know?” said Fouche, raising his eyes curiously to General D’Hubert’s tense, set face. “Take one of these pens, and run it through the name yourself. This is the only list in existence. If you are careful to take up enough ink no one will be able to tell what was the name struck out. But, par exemple, I am not responsible for what Clarke will do with him afterwards. If he persists in being rabid he will be ordered by the Minister of War to reside in some provincial town under the supervision of the police.”
A few days later General D’Hubert was saying to his sister, after the first greetings had been got over: “Ah, my dear Leonie! it seemed to me I couldn’t get away from Paris quick enough.”
“Effect of love,” she suggested, with a malicious smile.
“And horror,” added General D’Hubert, with profound seriousness. “I have nearly died there of . . . of nausea.”
His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him attentively he continued, “I have had to see Fouche. I have had an audience. I have been in his cabinet. There remains with one, who had the misfortune to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished dignity, an uneasy feeling of being not so clean, after all, as one hoped one was. . . . But you can’t understand.”
She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well, on the contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly, and liked him as he was. Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation, and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.
“My dear Armand,” she said, compassionately, “what could you want from that man?”
“Nothing less than a life,” answered General D’Hubert. “And I’ve got it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the necessity to the man I had to save.”