effaced.
More than eighty of the inhabitants were slaughtered before his eyes.
Sons were killed in the arms of their mothers, who vainly stretched
those bloody arms to Heaven imploring vengeance. The successive
pacifications of Brittany and Vendee have never slaked the thirst for
murder which burns his entrails. He is the same in 1800 that he was in
1793. Well, this man--"

Roland looked at the general.

"This man," continued the general, with the utmost calmness, "is to die.
Seeing that society did not condemn him, I have condemned him."

"What! Die at La Roche-Bernard, in the midst of the Republicans; in
spite of his bodyguard of assassins and executioners?"

"His hour has struck; he is to die."

Cadoudal pronounced these words with such solemnity that no doubt
remained in Roland's mind, not only as to the sentence, but also the
execution of it. He was thoughtful for an instant.

"And you believe that you have, the right to judge and condemn that man,
guilty as he is?"

"Yes; for that man has judged and condemned, not the guilty but the
innocent."

"If I said to you: 'On my return to Paris I will demand the arrest and
trial of that man,' would you not trust my word?"

"I would trust your word; but I should say to you: 'A maddened wild
beast escapes from its cage, a murderer from his prison; men are men,
subject to error. They have sometimes condemned the innocent, they might
spare the guilty.' My justice is more certain than yours, colonel, for
it is the justice of God. The man will die."

"And by what right do you claim that your justice, the justice of a man
liable to error like other men, is the justice of God?"

"Because I have made God a sharer in that justice. Oh! my condemnation
of that man is not of yesterday."

"How do you mean?"

"In the midst of a storm when thunder roared without cessation, and the
lightning flashed from minute to minute, I raised my arms to heaven, and
I said to God: 'O God! whose look is that lightning, whose voice is that
thunder, if this man ought to die, extinguish that lightning, still the
thunder for ten minutes. The silence of the skies, the darkness of the
heavens shall be thy answer!' Watch in hand, I counted eleven minutes
without a flash or a sound. I saw at the point of a promontory a boat,
tossed by a terrible tempest, a boat with but one man in it, in danger
every minute of sinking; a wave lifted it as the breath of an infant
lifts a plume, and cast it on t