“I was there one evening a week ago drinking a glass of wine during an hour Laroche had taken my place at the gate. It was the first time he had ever proposed such a thing, but that night he came to me and told me of the wonderful new wine at the Belle Image, so good and so cheap, since it no longer had to pay tithes, to the church and to the aristocrats. He ended by saying that as he was idle for an hour he would take my place at the gate while I went to the Belle Image and tasted the wine. I confess I was surprised; he saw it and explained that he wanted me to test for myself one of the benefits the Republic had conferred upon the people. So I went. I saw afterward that that was not his purpose at all.” “I can guess what his purpose was,” said M. le Comte; “but continue your story.” “I was, as I have said, drinking my wine,” continued Pasdeloup, “which was truly of a surprising excellence, when a man came and sat down beside me. For a moment I did not know him; then I saw it was Goujon. He greeted me with a kindness which surprised me when I remembered that it was I who had helped to capture him; but he seemed to have forgotten that. I saw that he was well dressed and that his hands were white. He ordered a bottle of wine even superior to that which I was drinking, invited me to join him, and began to tell me of the wonderful events which were happening in Paris--events which would end by making us all free, and rich, and happy. He said that the aristocrats and the priests had been starving and robbing and killing us for five hundred years, and that now it was our turn. “‘You remember that your own mother was starved to death, Pasdeloup,’ he said. “‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember that.’ “‘Although enough to feed a hundred people was wasted every day at the château.’ “‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘perhaps that is true.’ “‘You know how she would have been beaten had it been known that she stole even a morsel of food from the pigs.’ “‘Yes,’ I said again; ‘I know that.’ “‘You may perhaps remember,’ he went on, with a frightful contortion of the countenance, ‘the punishment I suffered for trapping a hare.’ “‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember.’ “‘And do you think it just, good God!’ he cried, ‘that a man should suffer like that for a fault so trivial? Yet that is what was happening day by day all over this broad land of France! What could we do? They took our grain for their bread, our flocks for their meat, our daughters for their pleasure. Did we so much as protest we were hanged on the nearest gallows as a warning to others not to lift their heads. We might live or die, starve or rot--what did it matter! We were less to them, as you have seen, than the swine in their pens!’ I do not know,” added Pasdeloup, in another tone, “whether all of this was true, but it had a certain air of truth about it.” “Most of it was true, I fear,” said M. le Comte in a low voice, “though I had never looked at it in quite that way.”