"Most certainly, M. le Marquis."
"Why not Victor?" he answered, laying his hand on my arm with a touch of the old bonhomie. "We shall soon be brothers, and then, doubtless, shall hate one another. In the meantime, give me your company to the gates. There was one other thing I wanted to name to you. Let me see--what was it?"
But either he could not immediately remember, or he found a difficulty in introducing the subject, for we were nearly half-way down the avenue of walnut trees that leads to the village when he spoke again. Then he plunged into the matter abruptly.
"You have heard of this protest?" he said.
"Yes," I answered reluctantly and with a foresight of trouble.
"You will sign it, of course?"
He had hesitated before he asked the question; I hesitated before I answered it. The protest to which he referred--how formal the phrase now sounds, though we know that under it lay the beginning of trouble and a new world--was one which it was proposed to move in the coming meeting of the noblesse at Cahors; its aim, to condemn the conduct of our representatives at Versailles, in consenting to sit with the Third Estate.
Now, for myself, whatever had been my original views on this question--and, as a fact, I should have preferred to see reform following the English model, the nobles' house remaining separate--I regarded the step, now it was taken, and legalised by the King, as irrevocable; and protest as useless. More, I could not help knowing that those who were moving the protest desired also to refuse all reform, to cling to all privileges, to balk all hopes of better government; hopes, which had been rising higher, day by day, since the elections, and which it might not now be so safe or so easy to balk. Without swallowing convictions, therefore, which were pretty well known, I could not see my way to supporting it. And I hesitated.
"Well?" he said at last, finding me still silent.
"I do not think that I can," I answered, flushing.