From the threshold of their booth, which leant against the town-hall, a man called Rouquin and his wife were watching this group of madmen.  Rouquin clipped dogs and gelded cats; he also frequented the inns.  His wife was a ragpicker and a bawd, but she had plenty of shrewdness.

“You see, Rouquin,” said she to her man, “they are committing a sacrilege.  They will repent of it.”

“You know nothing about it, wife,” answered Rouquin; “they, have become philosophers, and when one is once a philosopher he is a philosopher for ever.”

“I tell you, Rouquin, that sooner or later they will regret what they are doing to-day.  They ill-treat the saints because they have not helped them enough, but for all that the quails won’t fall ready cooked into their mouths.  They will soon find themselves as badly off as before, and when they have put out their tongues for enough they will become pious again.  Sooner than people think the day will come when Penguinia will again begin to honour her blessed patron.  Rouquin, it would be a good thing, in readiness for that day, if we kept a handful of ashes and some rags and bones in an old pot in our lodgings.  We will say that they are the relics of St. Orberosia and that we have saved them from the flames at the peril of our lives.  I am greatly mistaken if we don’t get honour and profit out of them.  That good action might be worth a place from the Cure to sell tapers and hire chairs in the chapel of St. Orberosia.”

On that same day Mother Rouquin took home with her a little ashes and some bones, and put them in an old jam-pot in her cupboard.

II.  TRINCO

The sovereign Nation had taken possession of the lands of the nobility and clergy to sell them at a low price to the middle classes and the peasants.  The middle classes and the peasants thought that the revolution was a good thing for acquiring lands and a bad one for retaining them.

The legislators of the Republic made terrible laws for the defence of property, and decreed death to anyone who should propose a division of wealth.  But that did not avail the Republic.  The peasants who had become proprietors bethought themselves that though it had made them rich, the Republic had nevertheless caused a disturbance to wealth, and they desired a system more respectful of private property and more capable of assuring the permanence of the new institutions.

They had not long to wait.  The Republic, like Agrippina, bore her destroyer in her bosom.

Having great wars to carry on, it created military forces, and these were destined both to save it and to destroy it.  Its legislators thought they could restrain their generals by the fear of punishment, but if they sometimes cut off the heads of unlucky soldiers they could not do the same to the fortunate soldiers who obtained over it the advantages of having saved its existence.