f
the gendarmerie, the Comte de Soulanges, who by that time had become a
colonel, asked for a brigade for his former protector, and later still
he solicited the post we have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all
these influences, the marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy
banker of the quai Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was
far stronger in the community than a lieutenant-general driven into
retirement.

If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the
quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful
to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads
Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never
threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an
enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the serpent;
and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a blow to the
self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done to a person's
interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is forgiven or
explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never ceases to bleed
from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral being is actually
more sensitive, more living as it were, than the physical being. The
heart and the blood are less impressible than the nerves. In short,
our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You may reconcile
two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in
La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the
calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the
despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before
they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom
speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since 1789 France has been trying
to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal. To say
to a man, "You are a swindler," may be taken as a joke; but to catch him
in the act and prove it to him with a cane on his back, to threaten him
with a police-court and not follow up the threat, is to remind him of
the inequality of conditions. If the masses will not brook any species
of superiority, is it likely that a swindler will forgive that of an
honest man?

Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying
off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;
Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matt