pparently
fixed on vacancy.

"Here! At your orders, Prince!" said Hulot, affecting a graceful ease of
manner.

The Marshal looked hard at the Baron, without saying a word, during the
time it took him to come from the door to within a few steps of where
the chief stood. This leaden stare was like the eye of God; Hulot could
not meet it; he looked down in confusion.

"He knows everything!" said he to himself.

"Does your conscience tell you nothing?" asked the Marshal, in his deep,
hollow tones.

"It tells me, sir, that I have been wrong, no doubt, in ordering
_razzias_ in Algeria without referring the matter to you. At my age,
and with my tastes, after forty-five years of service, I have
no fortune.--You know the principles of the four hundred elect
representatives of France. Those gentlemen are envious of every
distinction; they have pared down even the Ministers' pay--that says
everything! Ask them for money for an old servant!--What can you expect
of men who pay a whole class so badly as they pay the Government legal
officials?--who give thirty sous a day to the laborers on the works at
Toulon, when it is a physical impossibility to live there and keep a
family on less than forty sous?--who never think of the atrocity of
giving salaries of six hundred francs, up to a thousand or twelve
hundred perhaps, to clerks living in Paris; and who want to secure our
places for themselves as soon as the pay rises to forty thousand?--who,
finally, refuse to restore to the Crown a piece of Crown property
confiscated from the Crown in 1830--property acquired, too, by Louis
XVI. out of his privy purse!--If you had no private fortune, Prince,
you would be left high and dry, like my brother, with your pay and not
another sou, and no thought of your having saved the army, and me with
it, in the boggy plains of Poland."

"You have robbed the State! You have made yourself liable to be brought
before the bench at Assizes," said the Marshal, "like that clerk of the
Treasury! And you take this, monsieur, with such levity."

"But there is a great difference, monseigneur!" cried the baron. "Have I
dipped my hands into a cash box intrusted to my care?"

"When a man of your rank commits such an infamous crime," said
the Marshal, "he is doubly guilty if he does it clumsily. You have
compromised the honor of our official administration, which hitherto has
been the purest in Europe!--And all for two hundred thousand francs and
a hussy!"