The train, after the ordinary delay of a few minutes, again started.  The night was dark.  Terrier had fallen asleep.  Suddenly Preveraud felt a knee press against his, it was the knee of the policeman.  A boot placed itself softly on his foot, it was a horse-soldier’s boot.  An idyll had just germinated in the gendarme’s soul.  He first tenderly pressed Preveraud’s knee, and then emboldened by the darkness of the hour and by the slumbering husband, he ventured his hand as far as her dress, a circumstance foreseen by Moliere, but the fair veiled one was virtuous.  Preveraud, full of surprise and rage, gently pushed back the gendarme’s hand.  The danger was extreme.  Too much love on the part of the gendarme, one audacious step further, would bring about the unexpected, would abruptly change the eclogue into an official indictment, would reconvert the amorous satyr into a stony-hearted policeman, would transform Tircis into Vidocq; and then this strange thing would be seen, a passenger guillotined because a gendarme had committed an outrage.  The danger increased every moment.  Terrier was sleeping.  Suddenly the train stopped.  A voice cried, “Quievrain!” and the door was opened.  They were in Belgium.  The gendarme, obliged to stop here, and to re-enter France, rose to get out, and at the moment when he stepped on to the ground he heard behind him these expressive words coming from beneath the lace veil, “Be off, or I’ll break your jaw!”

[34] See “Les Hommes de l’Exile.”

[35] The name given to a population belonging to the Romanic family, and more particularly to those of French descent, who occupy the region along the frontiers of the German-speaking territory in the South Netherlands from Dunkirk to Malmedy in Rhenish Prussia.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS AND THE MIXED COMMISSIONS

Justice sometime meets with strange adventures.

This old phrase assumed a new sense.

The code ceased to be a safeguard.  The law became something which had sworn fealty to a crime.  Louis Bonaparte appointed judges by whom one felt oneself stopped as in the corner of a wood.  In the same manner as the forest is an accomplice through its density, so the legislation was an accomplice by its obscurity.  What it lacked at certain points in order to make it perfectly dark they added.  How?  By force.  Purely and simply.  By decree. Sic jubeo.  The decree of the 17th of February was a masterpiece.  This decree completed the proscription of the person, by the proscription of the name.  Domitian could not have done better.  Human conscience was bewildered; Right, Equity, Reason felt that the master had over them the authority that a thief has over a purse.  No reply.  Obey.  Nothing resembles those infamous times.

Every iniquity was possible.  Legislative bodies supervened and instilled so much gloom into legislation that it was easy to achieve a baseness in this darkness.