"Sacré Nom!" he cried, "what of that? Do you think that I am not a gentleman because I have served in America instead of in France?"
"No," I said, scarcely able to restrain a smile. "But it is playing into their hands. So you said yourself, a minute ago, and----"
"Will you help me, or will you not, sir?" he retorted angrily. And then, as the lawyer tried to intervene, "Be silent, you!" he continued, turning on him so violently that the scrivener jumped back a pace. "What do you know of these things? You miserable pettifogger! you----"
"Softly, softly, M. le Capitaine," I said, startled by this outbreak, and by the prospect of further brawling which it disclosed. "M. l'Avoué is doing merely his duty in remonstrating. He is in the right, and----
"I have nothing to do with him! And for you--you will not assist me?"
"I did not say that."
"Then, if you will, I crave your services at once! At once," he said more calmly; but he still kept his shoulder to the lawyer. "I have appointed a meeting behind the Cathedral. If you will honour me, I must ask you to do so immediately."
I saw that it was useless to say more; that he had made up his mind; and for answer I took up my hat. In a moment we were moving towards the door. The lawyer, the grocer, half a dozen cried out on us, and would have stopped us. But Father Benôit remained silent, and I went on down the stairs, and out of the house. Outside it was easy to see that the quarrel and insult had had spectators; a gloomy crowd, not compact, but made up of watching groups, filled all the sunny open part of the square. The pavement, on the other hand, along which we had to pass to go to the Cathedral, had for its only occupants a score or more of gentlemen, who, wearing white cockades, walked up and down in threes and fours. The crowd eyed them silently; they affected to see nothing of the crowd. Instead, they talked and smiled carelessly, and with half-opened eyes; swung their canes, and saluted one another, and now and then stopped to exchange a word or a pinch of snuff. They wore an air of insolence, ill-hidden, which the silent, almost cowed looks of the multitude, as it watched them askance, seemed to justify.
We had to run the gauntlet of these; and my face burned with shame, as we passed. Many of the men, whom I met now, I had met two days before at Madame St. Alais', where they had seen me put on the white cockade; they saw me now in the opposite camp, they knew nothing of my reasons, and I read in their averted eyes and curling lips what they thought of the change. Others--and they looked at me insolently, and scarcely gave me room to pass--were strangers, wearing military swords, and the cross of St. Louis.
Fortunately the passage was as short as it was painful. We passed under the north wall of the Cathedral, and through a little door into a garden, where lime trees tempered the glare of the sun, and the town, with its crowd and noise, seemed to be in a moment left behind. On the right rose the walls of the apse and the heavy eastern domes of the Cathedral; in front rose the ramparts; on the left an old, half-ruined tower of the fourteenth century lifted a frowning ivy-covered head. In the shadow, at its foot, on a piece of smooth sward, a group of four persons were standing waiting for us.