them up unless compelled by
a power greater than their own audacity.

At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years
of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black hair,
skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple blotches,
yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a muscular
frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating forehead, and a
hanging lip,--Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his real character under
an external stupidity, lightened at times by a show of experience, which
seemed all the more intelligent because he had acquired in the company
of his father-in-law a sort of bantering talk, much affected by old
Fourchon and Vermichel. His nose, flattened at the end as if the finger
of God intended to mark him, gave him a voice which came from his
palate, like that of all persons disfigured by a disease which thickens
the nasal passages, through which the air then passes with difficulty.
His upper teeth overlapped each other, and this defect (which Lavater
calls terrible) was all the more apparent because they were as white as
those of a dog. But for a certain lawless and slothful good humor, and
the free-and-easy ways of a rustic tippler, the man would have alarmed
the least observing of spectators.

If the portraits of Tonsard, his inn, and his father-in-law take a
prominent place in this history, it is because that place belongs to him
and to the inn and to the family. In the first place, their existence,
so minutely described, is the type of a hundred other households in the
valley of Les Aigues. Secondly, Tonsard, without being other than the
instrument of deep and active hatreds, had an immense influence on the
struggle that was about to take place, being the friend and counsellor
of all the complainants of the lower classes. His inn, as we shall
presently see, was the rendezvous for the aggressors; in fact, he became
their chief, partly on account of the fear he inspired throughout the
valley--less, however, by his actual deeds than by those that were
constantly expected of him. The threat of this man was as much dreaded
as the thing threatened, so that he never had occasion to execute it.

Every revolt, open or concealed, has its banner. The banner of the
marauders, the drunkards, the idlers, the sluggards of the valley des
Aigues was the terrible tavern of the Grand-I-Vert. Its frequenters
found amusement there,--as rare and much