“See these two beggars,” he exclaimed, “pretending to patriotism!  They have no energy, no courage, no civism.  Why, you might have remained for a twelvemonth under their very nostrils before they would have found you out.  Gilet is the man for the service of his country.”  Merely to stop the torrent of his complainings, I asked him some vague questions relative to the nobleman whom I was now following to Paris.  But the patriot was not to be moved from his topic.

“Hah!  Citizen Lanfranc.  All is over with him.  He once held his head high enough, but it will soon be as low as ever it was high.  Yet I could have forgiven his aristocracy, if he had not put these two ‘chiens’ above me.”

The position in which the mayor and his deputy sat, on the box of the chaise, continually presenting them to the eye of my companion, kept his choler peculiarly active.

“One of these fellows,” he exclaimed, “was the Marquis’s cook, another his perruquier! I was his tailor.  Every man of taste and talent knows the superiority of my profession; for what is the first of noblemen without elegance of costume, or what indeed would man himself be without my art, the noblest and the earliest art of mankind?  And yet he made these two ‘brigands’ mayor and deputy—­peste!  I did my duty.  I denounced him on the spot.  I did more.  The aristocrat had a faction in the town.  It was filled with his dependents.  In fact, it had been built on his grounds, and tenanted by the old hangers-on of the family.  So, to make a clear stage, I denounced the town.”  He clapped his hands with exultation at this civic triumph.

My recollection of the miseries which his malice had caused roused me into wrath, and, rash as the act was, I grasped him by the collar, with the full intent of throwing the little writhing wretch out of the window; but, while I was lifting him from the seat to which he clung screaming for help, and had already forced him halfway outside, a shot whistled close by the head of the postilion, which brought him to a full stop.  “Mon Dieu!—­Brigands!” exclaimed Monsieur Gilet; and, dropping back into the carriage, attempted to make a screen of my body by slipping his adroitly behind me.  Two or three more discharges rattled through the trees, followed by a rush of peasants, who unceremoniously knocked down the two officials in front, and began a general scuffle with the gendarmes.  The night was so dark, that I could discover nothing of the melee but by the blaze of the fusils.  All, however, was quiet in a few moments, by the disappearance of the gendarmes, and the complete capture of the convoy—­M.  Gilet, mayors, and all.  Whether we had fallen into the hands of highwaymen, or of stragglers from the French army, was doubtful for a while, as not a syllable was spoken, nor a sound uttered, except by the unhappy functionaries, who grumbled prodigiously as they were dragged along through “rough and