The accusation brought a smile to the general’s lips.  “Michaud, I shall go at once to the Prefecture!” he cried, with a sort of fury, “if it is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for.  Let Madame la comtesse know that I have gone.  Ha, ha! they want war, do they?  Well, they shall have it; I’ll take my pleasure in thwarting them,—­every one of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their peasantry!  We are in the enemy’s country, therefore prudence!  Tell the foresters to keep within the limits of the law.  Poor Vatel, take care of him.  The countess is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of all this; otherwise I could never get her to come back here.”

Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril.  Michaud had been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the enemy’s power, though he saw its action.  The general, for his part, believed in the supremacy of the law.

The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has not the virtue we attribute to it.  It strikes unequally; it is so modified in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes its own principles.  This fact may be noted more or less distinctly throughout all ages.  Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert that the decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced throughout France?—­for instance, that the requisitions of the Convention for men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in the depths of Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at the great centres of social life?  What philosopher dares deny that a head falls to-day in such or such department, while in a neighboring department another head stays on its shoulders though guilty of a crime identically the same, and often more horrible?  We ask for equality in life, and inequality reigns in law and in the death penalty!

When the population of a town falls below a certain figure the administrative system is no longer the same.  There are perhaps a hundred cities in France where the laws are vigorously enforced, and there the intelligence of the citizens rises to the conception of the problem of public welfare and future security which the law seeks to solve; but throughout the rest of France nothing is comprehended beyond immediate gratification; people rebel against all that lessens it.  Therefore in nearly one half of France we find a power of inertia which defeats all legal action, both municipal and governmental.  This resistance, be it understood, does not affect the essential things of public polity.  The collection of taxes, recruiting, punishment of great crimes, as a general thing do systematically go on; but outside of such recognized necessities, all legislative decrees which affect customs, morals, private interests, and certain abuses, are a dead letter, owing to the sullen opposition of the people.  At the very moment when this book is going to press, this dumb resistance, which opposed Louis XIV. in Brittany, may still be seen and felt.  See the unfortunate results of the game-laws, to which we are now sacrificing yearly the lives of some twenty or thirty men for the sake of preserving a few animals.