e to give way, as they did on the other side of Burgundy, where they
sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back again, and the peasants
cut the woods just as much as they ever did."

"If we kill," said Vaudoyer; "it is better to kill one man; the question
is, how to do it without danger and frighten those Arminacs so that
they'll be driven out of the place."

"Which one shall we kill?" asked Laroche.

"Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly right.
You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't be one
of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now they're
there night and day,--demons!"

"Wherever one goes," said old Mother Tonsard,--who was seventy-eight
years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the
small-pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white
hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,--"wherever
one goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if
there's a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they seize
the whole bundle, and they say they'll arrest us. Ha, the villains!
there's no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you've got to undo the
bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes, kill 'em, and it
won't ruin France, I tell you."

"Little Vatel is not so bad," said Madame Tonsard.

"He!" said Laroche, "he does his business, like the others; when there's
a joke going he'll joke with you, but you are none the better with
him for that. He's worse than the rest,--heartless to poor folks, like
Michaud himself."

"Michaud has got a pretty wife, though," said Nicolas Tonsard.

"She's with young," said the old woman; "and if this thing goes on
there'll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she calves."

"Oh! those Arminacs!" cried Marie Tonsard; "there's no laughing with
them; and if you did, they'd threaten to arrest you."

"You've tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?" said Courtecuisse.

"You may bet on that."

"Well," said Tonsard with a determined air, "they are men like other
men, and they can be got rid of."

"But I tell you," said Marie, continuing her topic, "they won't be
cajoled; I don't know what's the matter with them; that bully at the
pavilion, he's married, but Vatel, Gaillard, and Steingel are not;
they've not a woman belonging to them; indeed, there's not a woman in
the place who would marry them."

"Well, we shal