"I shall not be the cause of your being punished more severely, shall I? If necessary I will go and ask the colonel for a permit. Although, according to what you have told me--" "It's not at all necessary," replied Landri hastily; and he added: "There's nothing more they can do to me." In his mouth these words were only too true. The shock that the marquis's sudden appearance had given him had changed instantly into inexpressible grief--the same grief that he had felt with such intensity on their meeting in Jaubourg's death-chamber. M. de Claviers' gestures, his glance, his voice, his breath, moved him to the lowest depths of his being; and the other, seeing his perturbation, but attributing it to disappointment because of his shattered career, said to him:-- "You are sad when I hoped to find you happy to take your leave of the army with that fine gesture, which I partly suggested to you! Do you remember? And you must remember, too, how often I have told you, and again only the other day, in the forest, that you could not stay with these people. One by one they'll drive all men of heart out of the service. What they want, these wretched successors of the Dantons and Carnots, who at least had some patriotism, is a national guard surrounded by spies!--Stand straight, Landri. Have the pride of the blow you have dealt them. We will prepare your defence together. It shall be a manifesto. We'll show these Blues, who think they have exterminated us, that there are still Whites in the land. We will argue once more a cause that has been pending more than a hundred years, from the decision of which we must appeal untiringly,--the cause of Condé's army. We will proclaim that the country is not one more than half of living Frenchmen, as their idiotic theory of majorities would have it; that the law is not one more than half of the representatives of that one more than half. In the word country [_patrie_] there is the word father [_père_]--_patria, pater_--The country is France as our fathers made it, or it is nothing. The law is tradition, as they handed it down to us to maintain, or it is nothing. We will say that, even in 1906, we nobles do not recognize 1789, that we have never recognized the night of the 4th of August, that we are gentlemen, and that a gentleman does not perform tasks of a certain sort. You must let me select your advocate and instruct him. A manifesto, Landri,--I propose to have a manifesto, which will stir up others!--Come, tell me the whole story. The newspapers are full of lies. They claim that you hesitated, that you went up the church steps with the sappers.--How did it happen?" "Why, just as they say," replied the young man.