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 of us) 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.  The passing away of the state of war, the only condition of society he had ever known, the horrible view of a world at peace, frightened him.  He went away to his little town firmly convinced 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 rank) was made dependent on the correctness of his conduct, and on the good reports of the police.  No longer in the army!  He felt suddenly strange to the earth, like a disembodied spirit.  It was impossible to exist.  But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity.  This could not be.  He waited for thunder, earthquakes, natural cataclysms; but nothing happened.  The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who having no resources within himself sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude.  He haunted the streets of the little town, gazing before him with lacklustre eyes, disregarding the hats raised on his passage; and people, nudging each other as he went by, whispered, “That’s poor General Feraud.  His heart is broken.  Behold how he loved the Emperor.”

The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest clustered round General Feraud with infinite respect.  He, himself, imagined his soul to be crushed by grief.  He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom.  His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide.  He never even thought of it once.  He thought of nothing.  But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most furious swearing could do no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of silence—­a sort of death to a southern temperament.

Great, therefore, was the sensation amongst the anciens militaires frequenting a certain little cafe; full of flies when one stuffy afternoon “that poor General Feraud” let out suddenly a volley of formidable curses.