"By no means," replied De Sancy. "In the first place, the difference of religion will be a great objection to many, and an excellent pretext to more. A thousand to one all the zealous Catholics will abandon the heretic monarch at once. Those who personally love him will seek to make him change his religion; those who love him not will leave him without any question. All who are already doubtful will seize this favourable opportunity of going over to the League. All who are serving upon interested motives will demand place, preferment, or promise, as the price of their future assistance. Of these--and I am sorry to say that at least one half of the royal camp is composed of such--of these there will be a general market--a buying and selling, as in the halls of Paris; and if the king cannot outbid the League, they will go over together." "Well, let them go," cried St. Real. "By Heaven! Monsieur de Sancy, I hold that we shall be better without such false and doubtful allies. Our swords will strike more firmly, our confidence in ourselves and in each other will be redoubled, when the army is purified from such a nest of mercenary villains." "Ah! my young friend," replied De Sancy, "you may make a good soldier; but you are not yet fit for a politician in this bad world of ours. Call them by some softer name, too, than mercenary villains," he added, with a laugh; "for, till you see the event, you do not know whom you may find amongst them." St. Real was silent; for his mind was not without some shade of doubt as to what would be the conduct of his own cousin in the event of the king's death breaking asunder all those ties which, for the time, united the incoherent parts of the royalist army together. However much St. Real might love the Count d'Aubin, and however much he might strive to conceal from himself the faults and failings which disfigured his character, he could not help experiencing a vague internal conviction that his actions were more the effect of impulse than of principle, and that there was not sufficient firmness in his character to restrain him from following where his passions or his interests led him, if to the path which he thus chose no very signal disgrace was attached in the eyes of the world. He was silent then, and a few minutes more brought them back to St. Cloud, which exhibited all the usual marks of a small place in which some great event has happened. The eager faces; the gliding up and down of important-looking persons; the whispering groups at every corner, and at every house-door; the loud-tongued politicians, demonstrating to their little assemblage of hearers the events that were to follow, or the events that were past; and here and there the mercenary soldier, sauntering indifferently through the streets, and caring not who died, or who survived, provided that his pay was sure, and that the blessed trade of war was not brought to an untimely end.