eard some little rascals cry out, 'The
Shopman! here's the Shopman!' and then they ran away."

"Ask Sibilet; the answer is in his line, he likes to make you
angry," said Michaud, with a pained look. "But--if you will have an
answer--well, that's a nickname these brigands have given you, general."

"What does it mean?"

"It means, general--well, it refers to your father."

"Ha! the curs!" cried the count, turning livid. "Yes, Michaud, my father
was a shopkeeper, an upholsterer; the countess doesn't know it. Oh!
that I should ever--well! after all, I have waltzed with queens and
empresses. I'll tell her this very night," he cried, after a pause.

"They also call you a coward," continued Michaud.

"Ha!"

"They ask how you managed to save yourself at Essling when nearly all
your comrades perished."

The accusation brought a smile to the general's lips. "Michaud, I shall
go at once to the Prefecture!" he cried, with a sort of fury, "if it
is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for. Let Madame la
comtesse know that I have gone. Ha, ha! they want war, do they? Well,
they shall have it; I'll take my pleasure in thwarting them,--every one
of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their peasantry! We are in
the enemy's country, therefore prudence! Tell the foresters to keep
within the limits of the law. Poor Vatel, take care of him. The countess
is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of all this; otherwise I
could never get her to come back here."

Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril. Michaud had
been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the enemy's
power, though he saw its action. The general, for his part, believed in
the supremacy of the law.

The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has not
the virtue we attribute to it. It strikes unequally; it is so modified
in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes its own
principles. This fact may be noted more or less distinctly throughout
all ages. Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert that the
decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced throughout
France?--for instance, that the requisitions of the Convention for
men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in the depths of
Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at the great centres
of social life? What philosopher dares deny that a head falls to-day in
such or such department,