It is a crime, we repeat, on the part of a government, to place men of spirit in such dilemmas,--a crime against those who did not enter the army to perform certain tasks,--a crime against the fatherland, which is by this means robbed of some of its best leaders. Landri, as we have seen, had solved the problem in a manner entirely personal to himself. He had said: "To obey is to remain in the service. To refuse to obey is to resign. I want to remain in the service. I shall obey." But now a new element had intervened: the evidence of a felony committed against the lineage of the Claviers, in which his mere existence made him an accomplice. His mother's sin had given him a place in that lineage. What became of his personal convenience when put in the scale with such usurpation? Did it not bind him on his honor--for he still had such a thing whatever he may have said in the first shock of the revelation--never to do any act for which that lineage, now incarnate in the marquis, could reproach him from its standpoint? The conclusion was inescapable. At an incident of his military life so public, so certain to make a noise in the world, as obedience to an order to proceed against a church, it was not his own opinion that he should follow, but that of the head of that house in which he himself occupied a stolen place. This indisputable obligation suddenly imposed itself on Landri with irresistible force, and for the first time he recoiled in spirit from the prospect of an occurrence which would place before him the alternative of making up his mind against the will, so clearly expressed, of the Marquis de Claviers, or of sacrificing the profession to which he was at that moment more attached than ever. His whole thought was bent upon rejecting the probability of that test. He could not bear to face it now. "I am crazy. If they employ the dragoons for one of these inventories, they'll send more than one platoon. A lieutenant won't be in command, but a captain. I shall be second in command. If there's a door to be broken in, and the civil authorities don't furnish any men to do it, the captain will have to give the order, not I."