they were violent, and violence provokes violence.  Then it is no longer a struggle of keen, skillful, persevering men, seeing through the darkness in which they walk, but a match of fisticuffs in broad day.  Though we should be always in action, we should always shrink from view; and yet you could find no better plan than to draw universal attention to us by proceedings at once open and deplorably notorious.  To make them more secret, you call in the guard, the commissary of police, the jailers, for your accomplices.  It is pitiable, sir; nothing but the most brilliant success could cover such wretched folly; and this success has been wanting.”

“Sir,” said Father d’Aigrigny, deeply hurt, for the Princess de Saint Dizier, unable to conceal the sort of admiration caused in her by the plain, decisive words of Rodin, looked at her old lover, with an air that seemed to say, “He is right;”—­“sir, you are more than severe in your judgment; and, notwithstanding the deference I owe to you, I must observe, that I am not accustomed—­”

“There are many other things to which you are not accustomed,” said Rodin, harshly interrupting the reverend father; “but you will accustom yourself to them.  You have hitherto had a false idea of your own value.  There is the old leaven of the soldier and the worlding fermenting within you, which deprives your reason of the coolness, lucidity, and penetration that it ought to possess.  You have been a fine military officer, brisk and gay, foremost in wars and festivals, with pleasures and women.  These things have half worn you out.  You will never be anything but a subaltern; you have been thoroughly tested.  You will always want that vigor and concentration of mind which governs men and events.  That vigor and concentration of mind I have—­and do you know why?  It is because, solely devoted to the service of the Company, I have always been ugly, dirty, unloved, unloving—­I have all my manhood about me!”

In pronouncing these words, full of cynical pride, Rodin was truly fearful.  The princess de Saint-Dizier thought him almost handsome by his energy and audacity.

Father d’Aigrigny, feeling himself overawed, invincibly and inexorably, by this diabolical being, made a last effort to resist and exclaimed, “Oh! sir, these boastings are no proofs of valor and power.  We must see you at work.”

“Yes,” replied Rodin, coldly; “do you know at what work?” Rodin was fond of this interrogative mode of expression.  “Why, at the work that you so basely abandon.”

“What!” cried the Princess de Saint-Dizier; for Father d’Aigrigny, stupefied at Rodin’s audacity, was unable to utter a word.

“I say,” resumed Rodin, slowly, “that I undertake to bring to a good issue this affair of the Rennepont inheritance, which appears to you so desperate.”

“You?” cried Father d’Aigrigny.  “You?”
“I.”

“But they have unmasked our maneuvers.”

“So much the better; we shall be obliged to invent others.”