first greetings had been got over: &ldquo;Ah, my dear Leonie! it seemed to me I couldn&rsquo;t get away from Paris quick enough.&rdquo; </p> <p> &ldquo;Effect of love,&rdquo; she suggested, with a malicious smile. </p> <p> &ldquo;And horror,&rdquo; added General D&rsquo;Hubert, with profound seriousness. &ldquo;I have nearly died there of . . . of nausea.&rdquo; </p> <p> His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him attentively he continued, &ldquo;I have had to see Fouche. I have had an audience. I have been in his cabinet. There remains with one, who had the misfortune to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished dignity, an uneasy feeling of being not so clean, after all, as one hoped one was. . . . But you can&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo; </p> <p> She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well, on the contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly, and liked him as he was. Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation, and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto. </p> <p> &ldquo;My dear Armand,&rdquo; she said, compassionately, &ldquo;what could you want from that man?&rdquo; </p> <p> &ldquo;Nothing less than a life,&rdquo; answered General D&rsquo;Hubert. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ve got it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the necessity to the man I had to save.&rdquo; </p> <p> General Feraud, totally unable (as is the case with most of us) to comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War&rsquo;s order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and savage grinding of the teeth. The passing away of the state of war, the only condition of society he had ever known, the horrible view of a world at peace, frightened him. He went away to his little town firmly convinced that this could not last. There he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the scale of a colonel&rsquo;s rank) was made dependent on the correctness of his conduct, and on the good reports of the police. No longer in the army! He felt suddenly strange to the earth, like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity. This could not be. He waited for thunder, earthquakes, natural cataclysms; but nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who