“There is a great difference, is there not, monsieur,” asked Pasdeloup, “in whether one looks at a thing from above or from below?” “Yes,” agreed his master still more quietly, “there is.” “At any rate,” continued Pasdeloup, “Goujon grew more and more excited with each word he uttered. ‘Why is it,’ he demanded, ‘that some people wear lace and jewels and others only rags? Why should a noble’s pigs be treated better than his peasants? Why should the peasants toil from year to year in order that the priests and the aristocrats may live in idleness with their women, and have fine wines to drink, and fine clothes to wear, and great houses to shelter them, while we who make the wine, and spin the cloth, and build the houses, have only swill and rags and hovels? Why should they be warm in winter and we cold? Why should we permit their game to destroy our crops without being permitted to raise a hand to prevent it?’ “‘I do not know,’ I answered, ‘except that it was always so.’ “‘Well, it will be so no longer!’ he cried. ‘We are going to change all that. We are going to reverse things. Monsieur Veto has already sneezed in the sack; the Austrian woman and her whelp will follow him.’ “‘And what then?’ I asked. “‘Then we shall be free. Then we shall set about the work of establishing liberty, equality, fraternity. But first we will stuff the nobles’ mouths with dust, just as those good fellows at Paris stuffed old Foulon’s with hay. Come, you must join us, Pasdeloup. You also have wrongs to avenge.’ “‘I will think of it,’ I said, and returned to my post at the gate. “All that night I lay and thought of what Goujon had said, and I confess, M. le Comte, that it appeared to me reasonable. So long as I had imagined that things were as they were because the good God so willed it, I had not questioned them. But now I began to suspect that perhaps the good God had no hand in them at all, and that the only thing left for us was to do what we could to help ourselves. The next night I inquired for Laroche, but no one had seen him; so leaving the gate open--the first time that I had ever done so--I hastened to the Belle Image. Goujon was awaiting me; again he bought wine, and again he laid before me the wrongs of the peasantry. At last I told him that I would join the society which he was organizing at Dange. It was not until I had taken the oath that I discovered what it was he intended to do. He thought me wholly his, and indeed, from night to night, he convinced me more and more that justice was on our side. “Two nights ago he was for some reason very jubilant and drank more than usual. It was at that time that he confided to me his passion for madame; that he told me what it was he had been doing in that attic at the moment you discovered him. Then he passed on to the plan he had in mind.