ne, _foi de Butifer_! I will go to the Alps; the chamois-hunters
will not say a word; on the contrary, they will receive me with open
arms. I shall come to grief at the bottom of some glacier; but, if I am
to speak my mind, I would rather live for a couple of years among the
heights, where there are no governments, nor excisemen, nor gamekeepers,
nor procureurs du roi, than grovel in a marsh for a century. You are
the only one that I shall be sorry to leave behind; all the rest of them
bore me! When you are in the right, at any rate you don't worry one's
life out----"

"And how about Louise?" asked Benassis. Butifer paused and turned
thoughtful.

"Eh! learn to read and write, my lad," said Genestas; "come and enlist
in my regiment, have a horse to ride, and turn carabineer. If they
once sound 'to horse' for something like a war, you will find out
that Providence made you to live in the midst of cannon, bullets, and
battalions, and they will make a general of you."

"Ye-es, if Napoleon was back again," answered Butifer.

"You know our agreement," said the doctor. "At the second infraction of
it, you undertook to go for a soldier. I give you six months in which to
learn to read and write, and then I will find some young gentleman who
wants a substitute."

Butifer looked at the mountains.

"Oh! you shall not go to the Alps," cried Benassis. "A man like you, a
man of his word, with plenty of good stuff in him, ought to serve his
country and command a brigade, and not come to his end trailing after
a chamois. The life that you are leading will take you straight to the
convict's prison. After over-fatiguing yourself, you are obliged to take
a long rest; and, in the end, you will fall into idle ways that will be
the ruin of any notions of orderly existence that you have; you will get
into the habit of putting your strength to bad uses, and you will take
the law into your own hands. I want to put you, in spite of yourself,
into the right path."

"So I am to pine and fret myself to death? I feel suffocated whenever I
am in a town. I cannot hold out for more than a day, in Grenoble, when I
take Louise there----"

"We all have our whims, which we must manage to control, or turn them to
account for our neighbor's benefit. But it is late, and I am in a hurry.
Come to see me to-morrow, and bring your gun along with you. We will
talk this over, my boy. Good-bye. Go and sell your chamois in Grenoble."

The two horsemen went