“I heard that only yesterday,” said Madame Tonsard.  “I offered Groison a glass of brandy to get something out of him.”

“Groison! there’s another lucky fellow!” said Vaudoyer, “they’ve built him a house and given him a good wife, and he’s got an income and clothes fit for a king.  There was I, field-keeper for twenty years, and all I got was the rheumatism.”

“Yes, he’s very lucky,” said Godain, “he owns property—­”

“And we go without, like the fools that we are,” said Vaudoyer.  “Come, let’s be off and find out what’s going on at Conches; they are not so patient over there as we are.”

“Come on,” said Laroche, who was none too steady on his legs.  “If I don’t exterminate one of two of those fellows may I lose my name.”

“You!” said Tonsard, “you’d let them put the whole district in prison; but I—­if they dare to touch my old mother, there’s my gun and it never misses.”

“Well,” said Laroche to Vaudoyer, “I tell you that if they make a single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall.”

“He has said it, old Laroche!” cried Courtecuisse.

“He has said it,” remarked Vaudoyer, “but he hasn’t done it, and he won’t do it.  What good would it do to get yourself guillotined for some gendarme or other?  No, if you kill, I say, kill Michaud.”

During this scene Catherine Tonsard stood sentinel at the door to warn the drinkers to keep silent if any one passed.  In spite of their half-drunken legs they sprang rather than walked out of the tavern, and their bellicose temper started them at a good pace on the road to Conches, which led for over a mile along the park wall of Les Aigues.

Conches was a true Burgundian village, with one street, which was crossed by the main road.  The houses were built either of brick or of cobblestones, and were squalid in aspect.  Following the mail-road from Ville-aux-Fayes, the village was seen from the rear and there it presented rather a picturesque effect.  Between the road and the Ronquerolles woods, which continued those of Les Aigues and crowned the heights, flowed a little river, and several houses, rather prettily grouped, enlivened the scene.  The church and the parsonage stood alone and were seen from the park of Les Aigues, which came nearly up to them.  In front of the church was a square bordered by trees, where the conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert saw the gendarmerie and hastened their already hasty steps.  Just then three men on horseback rode rapidly out of the park of Les Aigues and the peasants at once recognized the general, his groom, and Michaud the bailiff, who came at a gallop into the square.  Tonsard and his party arrived a minute or two after them.  The delinquents, men and women, had made no resistance, and were standing between five of the Soulanges gendarmes and fifteen of those from Ville-aux-Fayes.  The whole village had assembled.  The fathers, mothers, and children of the prisoners were going and coming and bringing them what they might want in prison.  It was a curious scene, that of a population one and all exasperated, but nearly all silent, as though they had made up their minds to a course of action.  The old women and the young ones alone spoke.  The children, boys and girls, were perched on piles of wood and heaps of stones to get a better sight of what was happening.