f a fauteuil de Bourgeois?"

"You are then for the republic?"

"For what robbed me of my inheritance--what degraded me from my rank,
and reduced me to a state below that of my own vassals! Is this a cause
to uphold?"

"You are satisfied with military glory, perhaps," said I, scarcely
knowing what form of faith to attribute to him.

"In an army where my superiors are the very dregs of the people; where
the canaille have the command, and the chivalry of France is represented
by a sans-culotte!"

"The cause of the Church--"

A burst of ribald laughter cut me short, and laying his hand on my
shoulder, he looked me full in the face, while, with a struggle to
recover his gravity he said,

"I hope, my dear Maurice, you are not serious, and that you do not mean
this for earnest! Why, my dear boy, don't you talk of the Eleusinian
Mysteries, the Delphic Oracle, of Alchemy, Astrology--of any thing, in
short, of which the world, having amused itself, has, at length, grown
weary? Can't you see that the Church has passed away, and these good
priests have gone the same road as their predecessors. Is any acuteness
wanting to show that there is an end of this superstition that has
enthralled men's minds for a couple of thousand years? No, no, their
game is up, and forever. These pious men, who despised this world, and
yet had no other hold upon the minds of others than by the very craft
and subtlety that world taught them. These heavenly souls, whose whole
machinations revolved about earthly objects and the successes of this
groveling planet! Fight for _them_! No, _parbleu_; we owe them but
little love or affection. Their whole aim in life has been to disgust
one with whatever is enjoyable, and the best boon they have conferred
upon humanity, that bright thought, of locking up the softest eyes and
fairest cheeks of France in cloisters and nunneries! I can forgive our
glorious revolution much of its wrong when I think of the Pretre; not
but that they could have knocked down the Church without suffering the
ruins to crush the chateau!"

Such, in brief, were the opinions my companion held, and of which I was
accustomed to hear specimens every day; at first, with displeasure and
repugnance; later on, with more of toleration; and, at last, with a
sense of amusement at the singularity of the notions, or the dexterity
with which he defended them. The poison of his doctrines was the more
insidious, because, mingled with a certain dash