which
business will be at a standstill," said Lallier, incapable of rising
higher than the commercial sphere.

"My father, who saw the wars between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs
told me that our family would never have come out safely if one of his
grandfathers--his mother's father--had not been a Goix, one of those
famous butchers in the Market who stood by the Burgundians; whereas the
other, the Lecamus, was for the Armagnacs; they seemed ready to flay
each other alive before the world, but they were excellent friends in
the family. So, let us both try to save Christophe; perhaps the time may
come when he will save us."

"You are a shrewd one," said the jeweller.

"No," replied Lecamus. "The burghers ought to think of themselves;
the populace and the nobility are both against them. The Parisian
bourgeoisie alarms everybody except the king, who knows it is his
friend."

"You who are so wise and have seen so many things," said Babette,
timidly, "explain to me what the Reformers really want."

"Yes, tell us that, crony," cried the jeweller. "I knew the late king's
tailor, and I held him to be a man of simple life, without great talent;
he was something like you; a man to whom they'd give the sacrament
without confession; and behold! he plunged to the depths of this new
religion,--he! a man whose two ears were worth all of a hundred thousand
crowns apiece. He must have had secrets to reveal to induce the king and
the Duchesse de Valentinois to be present at his torture."

"And terrible secrets, too!" said the furrier. "The Reformation,
my friends," he continued in a low voice, "will give back to the
bourgeoisie the estates of the Church. When the ecclesiastical
privileges are suppressed the Reformers intend to ask that the _vilain_
shall be imposed on nobles as well as on burghers, and they mean to
insist that the king alone shall be above others--if indeed, they allow
the State to have a king."

"Suppress the Throne!" ejaculated Lallier.

"Hey! crony," said Lecamus, "in the Low Countries the burghers govern
themselves with burgomasters of their own, who elect their own temporary
head."

"God bless me, crony; we ought to do these fine things and yet stay
Catholics," cried the jeweller.

"We are too old, you and I, to see the triumph of the Parisian
bourgeoisie, but it will triumph, I tell you, in times to come as it did
of yore. Ha! the king must rest upon it in order to resist, and we have
always sold h