"Dear friend, I shall be overwhelmed with letters."

"You need not answer them."

"Yes, but for my personal gratification I, at least, must know why my
hero longs to die."

"Oh, I do not refuse to tell you."

"Let me hear, then."

"Well, suppose, instead of being professor of dialectics, Abelard had
been a soldier."

"Well?"

"Well, let us suppose that a bullet--"

"Excellent!"

"You understand? Instead of withdrawing to Paraclet, he would have
courted death at every possible opportunity."

"Hum! That will be difficult."

"Difficult! In what way?"

"To make the public swallow that."

"But since you are not going to tell the public."

"That is true. By my faith, I believe you are right. Wait."

"I am waiting."

"Have you Nodier's 'Souvenirs de la Revolution'? I believe he wrote one
or two pages about Guyon, Lepretre, Amiet and Hyvert."

"They will say, then, that you have plagiarized from Nodier."

"Oh! He loved me well enough during his life not to refuse me whatever
I shall take from him after his death. Go fetch me the 'Souvenirs de la
Revolution.'"

Alexandre brought me the book. I opened it, turned over two or three
pages, and at last discovered what I was looking for. A little of
Nodier, dear readers, you will lose nothing by it. It is he who is
speaking:

The highwaymen who attacked the diligences, as mentioned in the article
on Amiet, which I quoted just now, were called Lepretre, Hyvert, Guyon
and Amiet.

Lepretre was forty-eight years old. He was formerly a captain of
dragoons, a knight of St. Louis, of a noble countenance, prepossessing
carriage and much elegance of manner. Guyon and Amiet have never been
known by their real names. They owe that to the accommodating spirit
prevailing among the vendors of passports of those days. Let the reader
picture to himself two dare-devils between twenty and thirty years of
age, allied by some common responsibility, the sequence, perhaps of
some misdeed, or, by a more delicate and generous interest, the fear of
compromising their family name. Then you will know of Guyon and Amiet
all that I can recall. The latter had a sinister countenance, to which,
perhaps, he owes the bad reputation with which all his biographers have
credited him. Hyvert was the son of a rich merchant of Lyons, who had
offered the sub-officer charged with his deportation sixty thousand
francs to permit his escape. He was at once the Achilles and the Paris
of the band.