"You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good
God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are
you here, you great simpleton?"

"_Dame_!" Pache doubtfully replied, "it is not for any pleasure of
mine that I am here--but the gendarmes--"

"Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks!--say,
do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of
spirit? I'll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars
we'd skip; yes, we'd go straight home, and leave that pig of a
Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts
with their beastly Prussians as best they may!"

There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its
work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled
theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man,
the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason
of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves
to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. _He_ was a
revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that
they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact,
except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and _he_ had an
opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they
all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily
against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d----d shop, which they
would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn't! And
Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on
Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was