e Charter make all Frenchmen equals," said Georges.

"Oh! be easy," said Pere Leger; "we are sure to get to La Chapelle by
mid-day,"--La Chapelle being the village next beyond the Barriere of
Saint-Denis.

CHAPTER IV. THE GRANDSON OF THE FAMOUS CZERNI-GEORGES

Those who travel in public conveyances know that the persons thus united
by chance do not immediately have anything to say to one another; unless
under special circumstances, conversation rarely begins until they have
gone some distance. This period of silence is employed as much in mutual
examination as in settling into their places. Minds need to get their
equilibrium as much as bodies. When each person thinks he has discovered
the age, profession, and character of his companions, the most talkative
member of the company begins, and the conversation gets under way with
all the more vivacity because those present feel a need of enlivening
the journey and forgetting its tedium.

That is how things happen in French stage-coaches. In other countries
customs are very different. Englishmen pique themselves on never opening
their lips; Germans are melancholy in a vehicle; Italians too wary to
talk; Spaniards have no public conveyances; and Russians no roads.
There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of France, that
gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a hurry to laugh
and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even
the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the
solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and
legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion. When
a young man of twenty-two, like the one named Georges, is clever and
lively, he is much tempted, especially under circumstances like the
present, to abuse those qualities.

In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior
human being of the party there assembled. He saw in the count a
manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown reason,
to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by Mistigris,
a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere Leger, the fat
farmer, an excellent subject to hoax. Having thus looked over the
ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of such companions.

"Let me see," he thought to himself, as the coucou went down the hill
from La Chapelle to the plain of Saint-Denis, "shall I pass myself
off for