a few steps of
where the chief stood. This leaden stare was like the eye of God;
Hulot could not meet it; he looked down in confusion.

"He knows everything!" said he to himself.

"Does your conscience tell you nothing?" asked the Marshal, in his
deep, hollow tones.

"It tells me, sir, that I have been wrong, no doubt, in ordering
_razzias_ in Algeria without referring the matter to you. At my age,
and with my tastes, after forty-five years of service, I have no
fortune.--You know the principles of the four hundred elect
representatives of France. Those gentlemen are envious of every
distinction; they have pared down even the Ministers' pay--that says
everything! Ask them for money for an old servant!--What can you
expect of men who pay a whole class so badly as they pay the
Government legal officials?--who give thirty sous a day to the
laborers on the works at Toulon, when it is a physical impossibility
to live there and keep a family on less than forty sous?--who never
think of the atrocity of giving salaries of six hundred francs, up to
a thousand or twelve hundred perhaps, to clerks living in Paris; and
who want to secure our places for themselves as soon as the pay rises
to forty thousand?--who, finally, refuse to restore to the Crown a
piece of Crown property confiscated from the Crown in 1830--property
acquired, too, by Louis XVI. out of his privy purse!--If you had no
private fortune, Prince, you would be left high and dry, like my
brother, with your pay and not another sou, and no thought of your
having saved the army, and me with it, in the boggy plains of Poland."

"You have robbed the State! You have made yourself liable to be
brought before the bench at Assizes," said the Marshal, "like that
clerk of the Treasury! And you take this, monsieur, with such levity."

"But there is a great difference, monseigneur!" cried the baron. "Have
I dipped my hands into a cash box intrusted to my care?"

"When a man of your rank commits such an infamous crime," said the
Marshal, "he is doubly guilty if he does it clumsily. You have
compromised the honor of our official administration, which hitherto
has been the purest in Europe!--And all for two hundred thousand
francs and a hussy!" said the Marshal, in a terrible voice. "You are a
Councillor of State--and a private soldier who sells anything
belonging to his regiment is punished with death! Here is a story told
to me one day by Colonel Pourin of the Second Lancer