“Cursed aristocrats!  We have done well to pull you down, and we will have you lower still.  How I despise myself for giving any one the chance to affront me thus.  The haughty old fool; if she had known her interest, she would have been too glad to make a powerful friend.  These royalists are in a ticklish position; I can tell her that.  She calls me De Riviere; that implies nobody without a ‘De’ to their name would have the presumption to visit her old tumble-down house.  Well, it is a lesson; I am a republican, and the Commonwealth trusts and honors me; yet I am so ungrateful as to go out of the way to be civil to her enemies, to royalists; as if those worn-out creatures had hearts, as if they could comprehend the struggle that took place in my mind between duty, and generosity to the fallen, before I could make the first overture to their acquaintance; as if they could understand the politeness of the heart, or anything nobler than curving and ducking and heartless etiquette.  This is the last notice I will ever take of that old woman, unless it is to denounce her.”

He walked home to the town very fast, his heart boiling, and his lips compressed, and his brow knitted.

To this mood succeeded a sullen and bitter one.  He was generous, but vain, and his love had humiliated him so bitterly, he resolved to tear it out of his heart.  He absented himself from church; he met the young ladies no more.  He struggled fiercely with his passion; he went about dogged, silent, and sighing.  Presently he devoted his leisure hours to shooting partridges instead of ladies.  And he was right; partridges cannot shoot back; whereas beautiful women, like Cupid, are all archers more or less, and often with one arrow from eye or lip do more execution than they have suffered from several discharges of our small shot.

In these excursions, Edouard was generally accompanied by a thick-set rustic called Dard, who, I believe, purposes to reveal his own character to you, and so save me that trouble.

One fine afternoon, about four o’clock, this pair burst remorselessly through a fence, and landed in the road opposite Bigot’s Auberge; a long low house, with “ICI on Loge A pied et A Cheval,” written all across it in gigantic letters.  Riviere was for moving homeward, but Dard halted and complained dismally of “the soldier’s gripes.”  The statesman had never heard of that complaint, so Dard explained that the vulgar name for it was hunger.  “And only smell,” said he, “the soup is just fit to come off the fire.”

Riviere smiled sadly, but consented to deign to eat a morsel in the porch.  Thereat Dard dashed wildly into the kitchen.