tears and honors,
while the avenger is crushed, living, out of the very shape of
humanity by the hands of the common hangman."

The churchman's lips moved for a moment, as if he were about to speak
in reply to the false doctrines which he heard enunciated by that
upright and honorable man, and good father, but, ere he spoke, he
reflected that those doctrines were held at that time, throughout
Christian Europe, unquestioned, and confirmed by prejudice and pride
beyond all the power of argument or of religion to set them aside, or
invalidate them. The law of chivalry, sterner and more inflexible than
that Mosaic code requiring an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,
which demanded a human life as the sacrifice for every rash word, for
every wrongful action, was the law paramount of every civilized land
in that day, and in France perhaps most of all lands, as standing
foremost in what was then deemed civilization. And the abbe well knew
that discussion of this point would only tend to bring out the
opinions of the Count de St. Renan, in favor of the sanguinary code of
honor, more decidedly, and consequently to confirm the mind of the
young man more effectually in what he believed himself to be a fatal
error.

The young man, who was evidently very deeply interested in the matter
of the conversation, had devoured every word of his father, as if he
had been listening to the oracles of a God; and, when he ceased, after
a pause of some seconds, during which he was pondering very deeply on
that which he had heard, he raised his intelligent face and said in an
earnest voice.

"I see, my father, all that you have alleged in palliation of the
count's crime, and I fully understand you--though I still think it the
most terrible thing I ever have heard tell of. But I do not perfectly
comprehend wherefore you ransack our language of all its deepest terms
of contempt which to heap upon the head of the Chevalier de la
Rochederrien? He was the count's sworn friend, she was the count's
wedded wife; they both were forsworn and false, and both betrayed him.
But in what was the chevalier's fault the greater or the viler?"

Those were strange days, in which such a subject could have been
discussed between two wise and virtuous parents and a son, whom it was
their chiefest aim in life to bring up to be a good and honorable
man--that son, too, barely more than a boy in years and understanding.
But the morality of those times was coarse