Daddy La Bretagne was lying in his corner and spitting
blood, and none of the rest spoke. What could
the others do, when he, the blustering of them all,
had been served so? The jade had been right when
she had brought in the intruder, and said:
“The king is here, old fellow.”
Only, she ought to have remembered that, after all,
she alone kept her subjects in check, and as Daddy
La Bretagne said, by a right object. With her
to console them, they would no doubt have borne anything,
but she was foolish enough to cut down their food,
and not to fill their common dish as full as it used
to be. She wanted to keep everything for her
lover, and that raised the exasperation of the eighteen
to its height, and so one night when she and the clown
were asleep, among all these fasting men, the eighteen
threw themselves upon them. They wrapped the
despot’s arms and legs up in tarpaulin, and in
the presence of the woman, who was firmly bound, they
flogged him till he was black and blue.
“Yes,” old Bretagne said to me, himself,
“yes, Monsieur, that was our revenge. The
king was guillotined in 1793, and so we guillotined
our king also.”
And he concluded with a sneer, and said: “Ah!
We wished to be just, and as it was not his head that
had made him our king, so, by Jove, we settled him.”
I was not very fond of going to inspect that asylum
for old, infirm men, officially, as I was obliged
to go over it in company of the superintendent, who
was talkative, and a statistician. But then, the
grandson of the foundress accompanied us, who was evidently
pleased at that minute inspection, and he was a charming
man, and the owner of a large forest, where he had
given me permission to shoot, and I was, of course,
obliged to pretend to be interested in his grandmother’s
philanthropic work. So with a smile on my lips
I endured the superintendent’s interminable
discourse, punctuating it here and there, as best
I could, by a:
“Ah! really! ... Very strange, indeed!
... I should never have believed it! ...”
I was absolutely ignorant of the matter to which I
replied thus, for my thoughts were lulled to repose
by the constant humming of our loquacious guide.
I was only vaguely conscious that no doubt the persons
and things would have appeared worthy of attention
to me if I had been there alone as an idler, for in
that case, I should certainly have asked the superintendent:
“Who is this Babette, whose name appears so
constantly in the complaints of so many of the inmates?”
Quite a dozen men and women had spoken to us about
her, now to complain of her, now to praise her; and
especially the women, as soon as they saw the superintendent,
cried out:
“M’sieur, Babette has again been ...”
“There! that will do, that will do!” he
interrupted them, his gentle voice suddenly becoming
harsh.
