done? The
daughters of General Simon?--imprisoned at Leipsic, shut up in a
convent at Paris! Adrienne de Cardoville?--placed in confinement.
Sleepinbuff--put in prison. Djalma?--quieted by a narcotic. One only
ingenious method, and a thousand times safer, because it acted morally,
not materially, was employed to remove M. Hardy. As for your other
proceedings--they were all bad, uncertain, dangerous. Why? Because they
were violent, and violence provokes violence. Then it is no longer a
struggle of keen, skillful, persevering men, seeing through the darkness
in which they walk, but a match of fisticuffs in broad day. Though we
should be always in action, we should always shrink from view; and yet
you could find no better plan than to draw universal attention to us
by proceedings at once open and deplorably notorious. To make them more
secret, you call in the guard, the commissary of police, the jailers,
for your accomplices. It is pitiable, sir; nothing but the most
brilliant success could cover such wretched folly; and this success has
been wanting."

"Sir," said Father d'Aigrigny, deeply hurt, for the Princess de Saint
Dizier, unable to conceal the sort of admiration caused in her by the
plain, decisive words of Rodin, looked at her old lover, with an air
that seemed to say, "He is right;"--"sir, you are more than severe in
your judgment; and, notwithstanding the deference I owe to you, I must
observe, that I am not accustomed--"

"There are many other things to which you are not accustomed," said
Rodin, harshly interrupting the reverend father; "but you will accustom
yourself to them. You have hitherto had a false idea of your own value.
There is the old leaven of the soldier and the worlding fermenting
within you, which deprives your reason of the coolness, lucidity, and
penetration that it ought to possess. You have been a fine military
officer, brisk and gay, foremost in wars and festivals, with pleasures
and women. These things have half worn you out. You will never be
anything but a subaltern; you have been thoroughly tested. You will
always want that vigor and concentration of mind which governs men and
events. That vigor and concentration of mind I have--and do you know
why? It is because, solely devoted to the service of the Company, I have
always been ugly, dirty, unloved, unloving--I have all my manhood about
me!"

In pronouncing these words, full of cynical pride, Rodin was truly
fearful. The princess d