If there was one thing that miserable muleteer-boy ought to have known better than another, it was the insuperable objection entertained by the Provencal peasant to any thing like trespass on his territory (the touchiness of the _proprietaire_ bears generally an inverse ratio to the extent of his possessions); yet, to make a short cut of about two hundred yards, he had led his party through a gap in the low stone wall over a strip of ground belonging to the very man who was least likely to overlook the intrusion. Jean Duchesne had a bad name in the neighborhood, and deserved it thoroughly; he was surly enough when sober (which was the exception), but when drunk there were no bounds to his blind, brutish ferocity, and his great personal strength made him a formidable antagonist. He was not an agreeable object to contemplate, that gaunt giant, as he stood there in his squalid, tattered dress, with rough, matted hair, and face flushed by recent intemperance, and flecked with livid stains of past debauches. You may see many such crowding round the guillotine or the tumbrel in pictures of the French Revolution. It is very odd that one can not write or read those two words without a boiling of the blood, a tingling at the fingers' ends, and a tightening of the muscles of the forearm--ineffably absurd when excited by a recollection seventy years old! Yet so it is. You may talk of oppression till you are tired; you may catalogue all the wrongs that _Jacques Bonhomme_ endured before his day of retaliation came; you may bring in your pet illustration of "the storm that was necessary to clear the atmosphere;" but you will never make some of us feel that the guilt of an Order--had it been blacker by a hundred shades--palliated the Massacre of its Innocents. If the _Marquis_ and _Mousquetaire_ only had suffered, they might have laid down their lives cheerfully, as they would have done the stake of any other lost game; and as for the priests, it was their privilege to be martyrs. But think of those fair matrons, and gentle girls, and delicate _mignonnes_, that had been petted from their childhood, cooped up in the foul courts of the Abbaye and La Force, with even the necessaries of life begrudged them, till the light died in their eyes and the gloss faded from their tresses; and then brought out to die in the chill, misty _Brumaire_ morning, howled at and derided by the swarm of bloodsuckers, till they cowered down, not in fear, but sickening horror, welcoming Samson and his satellites as friends and saviors. Remember, too, that there was scarcely an exception to the rule of patient courage, calm self-sacrifice, and pride of birth that never belied itself. Dubarry might shriek on the scaffold, but the Rohans died mute.