e concord and perfect equality had reigned, became a
hell, and that state of things could not last.

"Ah!" Daddy La Bretagne growled, "if only I were twenty years younger I
would nearly kill him! I have my Breton's hot head still, but my
confounded legs are no good any longer."

And he boldly challenged the clown to a duel, in which the latter was to
have his legs tied, and then both of them were to sit on the ground and
hack at each other with knives.

"Such a duel would be perfectly fair!" he replied, kicking him in the
side with one of his clogs, and the woman burst out laughing, and said:

"At any rate, you cannot compete with him on equal terms as regards
myself, so do not worry yourself about it."

Daddy La Bretagne was lying in his corner and spitting blood, and none
of the rest spoke. What could the others do, when he, the blustering of
them all, had been served so? The jade had been right when she had
brought in the intruder, and said:

"The king is here, old fellow."

Only, she ought to have remembered that, after all, she alone kept her
subjects in check, and as Daddy La Bretagne said, by a right object.
With her to console them, they would no doubt have borne anything, but
she was foolish enough to cut down their food, and not to fill their
common dish as full as it used to be. She wanted to keep everything for
her lover, and that raised the exasperation of the eighteen to its
height, and so one night when she and the clown were asleep, among all
these fasting men, the eighteen threw themselves upon them. They wrapped
the despot's arms and legs up in tarpaulin, and in the presence of the
woman, who was firmly bound, they flogged him till he was black and
blue.

"Yes," old Bretagne said to me, himself, "yes, Monsieur, that was our
revenge. The king was guillotined in 1793, and so we guillotined our
king also."

And he concluded with a sneer, and said: "Ah! We wished to be just, and
as it was not his head that had made him our king, so, by Jove, we
settled him."

BABETTE

I was not very fond of going to inspect that asylum for old, infirm
men, officially, as I was obliged to go over it in company of the
superintendent, who was talkative, and a statistician. But then, the
grandson of the foundress accompanied us, who was evidently pleased at
that minute inspection, and he was a charming man, and the owner of a
large forest, where he had given me permission to shoot, and I was, of
course,