ged it won't
be for a shot from my gun, but for the gabble of your tongue."

"And do you really suppose that Les Aigues will be cut up and sold in
lots for your pitiful benefit?" asked Fourchon. "Pshaw! haven't you
discovered in the last thirty years that old Rigou has been sucking the
marrow out of your bones that the middle-class folks are worse than
the lords? Mark my words, when that affair happens, my children, the
Soudrys, the Gaubertins, the Rigous, will make you kick your heels in
the air. 'I've the good tobacco, it never shall be thine,' that's
the national air of the rich man, hey? The peasant will always be
the peasant. Don't you see (but you never did understand anything of
politics!) that government puts such heavy taxes on wine only to hinder
our profits and keep us poor? The middle classes and the government,
they are all one. What would become of them if everybody was rich? Could
they till their fields? Would they gather the harvest? No, they
_want_ the poor! I was rich for ten years and I know what I thought of
paupers."

"Must hunt with them, though," replied Tonsard, "because they mean to
cut up the great estates; after that's done, we can turn against them.
If I'd been Courtecuisse, whom that scoundrel Rigou is ruining, I'd have
long ago paid his bill with other balls than the poor fellow gives him."

"Right enough, too," replied Fourchon. "As Pere Niseron says (and he
stayed republican long after everybody else), 'The people are tough;
they don't die; they have time before them.'"

Fourchon fell into a sort of reverie; Tonsard profited by his
inattention to take back the trap, and as he took it up he cut a slip
below the coin in his father-in-law's pocket at the moment when the old
man raised his glass to his lips; then he set his foot on the five-franc
piece as it dropped on the earthen floor just where it was always kept
damp by the heel-taps which the customers flung from their glasses.
Though quickly and lightly done, the old man might, perhaps, have felt
the theft, if Vermichel had not happened to appear at that moment.

"Tonsard, do you know where you father is?" called that functionary from
the foot of the steps.

Vermichel's shout, the theft of the money, and the emptying of old
Fourchon's glass, were simultaneous.

"Present, captain!" cried Fourchon, holding out a hand to Vermichel to
help him up the steps.

Of all Burgundian figures, Vermichel would have seemed to you the most
Bu