s saying to his sister after the
first greetings had been got over:

"Ah, my dear Leonie! It seemed to me I couldn't get away from Paris
quick enough."

"Effect of love," she suggested with a malicious smile.

"And horror," added General D'Hubert with profound seriousness. "I have
nearly died there of... of nausea."

His face was contracted with disgust. And as his sister looked at him
attentively he continued:

"I have had to see Fouche. I have had an audience. I have been in his
cabinet. There remains with one, after the misfortune of having to
breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished
dignity, the uneasy feeling of being not so clean after all as one hoped
one was.... But you can't understand."

She nodded quickly several times. She understood very well on the
contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was.
Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin
Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every
virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole
generation and died obscurely as Duke of Otranto.

"My dear Armand," she said compassionately, "what could you want from
that man?"

"Nothing less than a life," answered General D'Hubert. "And I've got
it. It had to be done. But I feel yet as if I could never forgive the
necessity to the man I had to save."

General Feraud, totally unable as is the case with most men to
comprehend what was happening to him, received the Minister of War's
order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings
whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and
savage grinding of the teeth. But he went. The bewilderment and awe at
the passing away of the state of war--the only condition of society he
had ever known--the prospect of a world at peace frightened him. He went
away to his little town firmly persuaded that this could not last. There
he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension
(calculated on the scale of a colonel's half-pay) was made dependent on
the circumspection of his conduct and on the good reports of the police.
No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a
disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted
from sheer incredulity. This could not be. It could not last. The
heavens would fall presently. He called upon thunder, earthquakes,
natural ca