"When shall you make up your mind to shut the door in the face of those rascals?" asked M. de Claviers. They were going downstairs, he first, so that he could not see the intensity of distress depicted on his companion's face while he persisted: "I am not disturbed; they'll drive you to it, and, it may be, before very long. On the train Bressieux showed me a newspaper in which something was said about resuming the taking of inventories in the Saint-Mihiel region.--'What will Landri do, if he gets into that?' he asked me.--'What you would do,' I replied.--I confess that I should be happy to see you take your leave with a fine gesture. Besides it's high time that a gentleman should say something that hasn't yet been said. Among the officers who have resigned as a protest against shameful orders there have been several of noble birth. They have all talked about their consciences, their religious principles.--Conscience? I don't care much for that word. It has served too often as a solemn label for anarchy.--Religious principles? That's better. That's an appeal to a discipline that does not adapt itself to people's whims. But for the noble there's still another duty, that of not disregarding the call of honor. And one does disregard it when one acts in opposition to the will of the ancestors from whom he is descended, of those deceased ancestors who in their lifetime served a Catholic France. We, their progeny, owe it to them to serve the same France. France without the Church is not the France of which our houses are a part. For a noble to serve this France is to renounce his nobility. Such renunciations are the suicide of honor, of that honor which a great bishop called the safeguard of justice, the glorious supplement of the laws. That is what I would like to hear proclaimed to the faces of those curs, by a Claviers-Grandchamp." They were in the street now. The marquis gazed at his supposititious son with those piercing blue eyes which were no longer dimmed by a tear. It was the very climax of tragedy,--of the internal tragedy which life evolves simply by the interplay of its secret contrasts,--this quasi-feudal profession of faith, enounced upon that threshold, before the child born of treachery, by the bitterly outraged nobleman who knew nothing of the outrage.