like a coward, while feigning politeness and bidding him
good-evening. You are a liar, a miscreant; you have robbed me of my only
society, my only riches; you have taken delight in evil. God preserve
you from living if you are going on in this way."

"Oh, Monsieur Patience!" cried the boy, clasping his hands; "do not
curse me; do not bewitch me; do not give me any illness; it wasn't I!
May God strike me dead if it was!"

"If it wasn't you, it was this one, then!" said Patience, seizing me by
the coat-collar and shaking me like a young tree to be uprooted.

"Yes, I did it," I replied, haughtily; "and if you wish to know my name,
learn that I am called Bernard Mauprat, and that a peasant who lays a
hand on a nobleman deserves death."

"Death! You! You would put me to death, Mauprat!" cried the old man,
petrified with surprise and indignation. "And what would God be, then,
if a brat like you had a right to threaten a man of my age? Death! Ah,
you are a genuine Mauprat, and you bite like your breed, cursed whelp!
Such things as they talk of putting to death the very moment they are
born! Death, my wolf-cub! Do you know it is yourself who deserves death,
not for what you have just done, but for being the son of your father,
and the nephew of your uncles? Ah! I am glad to hold a Mauprat in the
hollow of my hand, and see whether a cur of a nobleman weighs as much as
a Christian."

As he spoke he lifted me from the ground as he would have lifted a hare.

"Little one," he said to my comrade, "you can run home; you needn't
be afraid. Patience rarely gets angry with his equals; and he always
pardons his brothers, because his brothers are ignorant like himself,
and know not what they do; but a Mauprat, look you, is a thing that
knows how to read and write, and is only the viler for it all. Run
away, then. But no; stay; I should like you once in your life to see
a nobleman receive a thrashing from the hand of a peasant. And that is
what you are going to see; and I ask you not to forget it, little one,
and to tell your parents about it."

Livid, and gnashing my teeth with rage, I made desperate efforts to
resist. Patience, with hideous calmness, bound me to a tree with an
osier shoot. At the touch of his great horny hand I bent like a reed;
and yet I was remarkably strong for my age. He fixed the owl to a branch
above my head, and the bird's blood, as it fell on me drop by drop,
caused me unspeakable horror; for though this wa