rosperity He gives you. You will rob your posterity. If you follow in
the steps of that poor singer's selfishness, which caused the evils that
now terrify us, you will bring back the scaffolds on which your fathers
died for the faults of their fathers. To do good humbly, in obscurity,
in country solitudes, as Rigou now does evil,--ah! that indeed is prayer
in action and dear to God. If in every district three souls only would
work for good, France, our country, might be saved from the abyss
that yawns; into which we are rushing headlong, through spiritual
indifference to all that is not our own self-interest. Change! you must
change your morals, change your ethics, and that will change your laws."

Though deeply moved as she listened to this grand utterance of true
catholic charity, the countess answered in the fatal words, "We will
consider it,"--words of the rich, which contain that promise to the ear
which saves their purses and enables them to stand with arms crossed in
presence of all disaster, under pretext that they were powerless.

Hearing those words, the abbe bowed to Madame de Montcornet and turned
off into a path which led him direct to the gate of Blangy.

"Belshazzar's feast is the everlasting symbol of the dying days of a
caste, of an oligarchy, of a power!" he thought as he walked away.
"My God! if it be Thy will to loose the poor like a torrent to reform
society, I know, I comprehend, why it is that Thou hast abandoned the
wealthy to their blindness!"

CHAPTER XII. SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT

Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy
to know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the
village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the gate
of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La Pechina's
grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second Angelus, to
dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.

Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser,
now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had been,
during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at Ville-aux-Fayes,
and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the district. Jean-Francois
Niseron, carved out of the wood that the apostles were made of, was
of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters and sculptors have united in
representing with the square brow of the people, the thick,