“Who is going to inform him I should like to know,” said Fouche, raising his eyes curiously to General D’Hubert’s white face.  “Take one of these pens and run it through the name yourself.  This is the only list in existence.  If you are careful to take up enough ink no one will be able to tell even what was the name thus struck out.  But, par example, I am not responsible for what Clarke will do with him.  If he persist in being rabid he will be ordered by the Minster of War to reside in some provincial town under the supervision of the police.”

A few days later General D’Hubert was saying to his sister after the first greetings had been got over: 

“Ah, my dear Leonie!  It seemed to me I couldn’t get away from Paris quick enough.”

“Effect of love,” she suggested with a malicious smile.

“And horror,” added General D’Hubert with profound seriousness.  “I have nearly died there of... of nausea.”

His face was contracted with disgust.  And as his sister looked at him attentively he continued: 

“I have had to see Fouche.  I have had an audience.  I have been in his cabinet.  There remains with one, after the misfortune of having to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished dignity, the uneasy feeling of being not so clean after all as one hoped one was....  But you can’t understand.”

She nodded quickly several times.  She understood very well on the contrary.  She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was.  Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.

“My dear Armand,” she said compassionately, “what could you want from that man?”

“Nothing less than a life,” answered General D’Hubert.  “And I’ve got it.  It had to be done.  But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the necessity to the man I had to save.”

General Feraud, totally unable as is the case with most men to comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War’s order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and savage grinding of the teeth.  But he went.  The bewilderment and awe at the passing away of the state of war—­the only condition of society he had ever known—­the prospect of a world at peace frightened him.  He went away to his little town firmly persuaded that this could not last.  There he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the scale of a colonel’s half-pay) was made dependent on the circumspection of his conduct and on the good reports of the police.  No longer in the army!  He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit.  It was impossible