home and go goodness knows where. But when
I saw them--these Prussians--it was too much for me. They made my blood
boil with rage, and I cried the whole day for shame. Oh, if I had only
been a man!--well, there! I watched them from my window--fat pigs that
they were with their spiked helmets--and my servant had to hold my hands
to prevent me throwing the furniture down on the top of them. Then some
of them came to be quartered on me, and I flew at the throat of the
first one--they are not harder to strangle than any one else--and would
have finished him too if they had not dragged me off by the hair. Of
course I had to lie low after that. So as soon as I found an opportunity
I left--and here I am."

Everybody congratulated her. She rose considerably in the estimation of
her companions, who had not shown themselves of such valiant mettle, and
listening to her tale, Cornudet smiled the benignant and approving smile
of an apostle--as a priest might on hearing a devout person praise the
Almighty; democrats with long beards having the monopoly of patriotism
as the men of the cassock possess that of religion. He then took up the
parable in a didactic tone with the phraseology culled from the notices
posted each day on the walls, and finished up with a flourish of
eloquence in which he scathingly alluded to "that blackguard of a
Badinguet."[2]

But Boule de Suif fired up at this for she was a Bonapartist. She turned
upon him with scarlet cheeks and stammering with indignation, "Ah! I
should just like to have seen any of you in his place! A nice mess you
would have made of it! It is men of your sort that ruined him, poor man.
There would be nothing for it but to leave France for good if we were
governed by cowards like you!"

Cornudet, nothing daunted, preserved a disdainful and superior smile,
but there was a feeling in the air that high words would soon follow,
whereupon the Count interposed, and managed, not without difficulty, to
quiet the infuriated young woman by asserting authoritatively that every
sincere opinion was to be respected. Nevertheless the Countess and the
manufacturer's wife, who nourished in their hearts the unreasoning
hatred of all well-bred people for the Republic and at the same time
that instinctive weakness of all women for uniformed and despotic
governments, felt drawn, in spite of themselves, to this woman of the
street who had so much sense of the fitness of things and whose opinions
so closely