“Don’t you see, old man, it’s all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a quarrel, let ’em go to work with their fists and fight it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men who don’t even know one another by sight and have not the slightest desire to fight.” The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who Badinguet[1] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby that he was: [1] Napoleon III. “Of course, let ’em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward.” But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in hand. “You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you here, you great simpleton?” “_Dame_!” Pache doubtfully replied, “it is not for any pleasure of mine that I am here—but the gendarmes—” “Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks!—say, do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of spirit? I’ll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars we’d skip; yes, we’d go straight home, and leave that pig of a Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts with their beastly Prussians as best they may!” There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau’s hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. _He_ was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and _he_ had an opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d——d shop, which they would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn’t! And Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a companion; so that, by way of inflaming _his_ passions also, it occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes, unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two men by the ears.