Tall, thin, and dark, Agaric used to walk in deep thought, with his breviary in his hand and his brow loaded with care, through the corridors of the school and the alleys of the garden.  His care was not limited to inculcating in his pupils abstruse doctrines and mechanical precepts and to endowing them afterwards with legitimate and rich wives.  He entertained political designs and pursued the realisation of a gigantic plan.  His thought of thoughts and labour of labours was to overthrow the Republic.  He was not moved to this by any personal interest.  He believed that a democratic state was opposed to the holy society to which body and soul he belonged.  And all the other monks, his brethren, thought the same.  The Republic was perpetually at strife with the congregation of monks and the assembly of the faithful.  True, to plot the death of the new government was a difficult and perilous enterprise.  Still, Agaric was in a position to carry on a formidable conspiracy.  At that epoch, when the clergy guided the superior classes of the Penguins, this monk exercised a tremendous influence over the aristocracy of Alca.

All the young men whom he had brought up waited only for a favourable moment to march against the popular power.  The sons of the ancient families did not practise the arts or engage in business.  They were almost all soldiers and served the Republic.  They served it, but they did not love it; they regretted the dragon’s crest.  And the fair Jewesses shared in these regrets in order that they might be taken for Christians.

One July as he was walking in a suburban street which ended in some dusty fields, Agaric heard groans coming from a moss-grown well that had been abandoned by the gardeners.  And almost immediately he was told by a cobbler of the neighbourhood that a ragged man who had shouted out “Hurrah for the Republic!” had been thrown into the well by some cavalry officers who were passing, and had sunk up to his ears in the mud.  Agaric was quite ready to see a general significance in this particular fact.  He inferred a great fermentation in the whole aristocratic and military caste, and concluded that it was the moment to act.

The next day he went to the end of the Wood of Conils to visit the good Father Cornemuse.  He found the monk in his laboratory pouring a golden-coloured liquor into a still.  He was a short, fat, little man, with vermilion-tinted cheeks and an elaborately polished bald head.  His eyes had ruby-coloured pupils like a guinea-pig’s.  He graciously saluted his visitor and offered him a glass of the St. Orberosian liqueur, which he manufactured, and from the sale of which he gained immense wealth.

Agaric made a gesture of refusal.  Then, standing on his long feet and pressing his melancholy hat against his stomach, he remained silent.

“Take a seat,” said Cornemuse to him.

Agaric sat down on a rickety stool, but continued mute.