“Country before family.”
But if the dangerous mission were for him, Don Paco would argue that he did not wish to compromise the sacred cause of liberty by a rash act.
Sometimes, instead of saying sacred, he said venerable, which, for Don Paco, had its own value and distinctive meaning.
If some Progressist leader in Madrid was supposed to have been a traitor against either the sacred, or the venerable cause, Don Paco cried out in the Lodge:
“A la barra with the citizen! A la barra!”
He himself did not know what la barra was; but it was a matter of a cry that would sound well, and that sounded admirably: A la barra!
When he was too excited, Don Paco admired English parliamentarism above everything else. Quentin had once told him that he looked like Sir Robert Peel.
Quentin had seen the figure of that orator on an advertisement for shoe-blacking; he had nothing but the vaguest ideas of Sir Robert’s existence; but it was all the same to Don Paco, and the comparison made him swell with pride.
Aside from these political farces, Don Paco Sánchez Olmillo, Master Surgeon and Master Mason, was a good sort of person, without an evil trait; he was a small, bald-headed old man, pimply and apopleptic. He had a thick neck, eyes that bulged so far from his head that they looked as if they had been stuck into his skin. At the slightest effort, with the most insignificant of his phrases, he blushed to the roots of his hair; if he turned loose one of his cries, his blush changed from red to violet, and even to blue.
Don Paco had great admirers among the members of the Lodge; they considered him a tremendous personage.