I was tired, and my appetite had been sharpened by a continued fast, so I sat down to my supper in a very good humor. Pierrot waited upon me with silent dexterity, and then, retiring to a little distance, stood watching me with folded arms, and an air which I was not slow to interpret: he had news, and longed to impart it.
“Well, Pierrot,” I said at last, “were you in the Grand Square to-day?”
“Yes, M. le Vicomte,” he replied eagerly; “and was it not a stirring sight?”
“Very,” I answered dryly; “and what is the feeling among the people, Pierrot? Are they pleased with the election?”
Pierrot shook his head with the air of a sage.
“The people have not much to do with it after all,” he said gravely. “The rabble have not the intelligence of our peasantry.”
This was a heavy judgment, for Pierrot, as an old retainer, looked down upon the peasantry as the scum of the earth.
“It is the soldiers here,” he went on, evidently glad to speak his mind; “they have the upper hand. I can’t understand this Streltsi.”
I laughed. “Few of us can, I suspect, Pierrot,” I said; “the Streltsi, or archers, were established by Ivan the Terrible, as a kind of national guard. Their duties descend from father to son, and they have ever been a privileged class.”
“They are ill to guide, monsieur,” Pierrot remarked sagely, as he handed me the wine.