“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!” said the Marshal, in a terrible voice.  “You are a Councillor of State—­and a private soldier who sells anything belonging to his regiment is punished with death!  Here is a story told to me one day by Colonel Pourin of the Second Lancers.  At Saverne, one of his men fell in love with a little Alsatian girl who had a fancy for a shawl.  The jade teased this poor devil of a lancer so effectually, that though he could show twenty years’ service, and was about to be promoted to be quartermaster—­the pride of the regiment —­to buy this shawl he sold some of his company’s kit.—­Do you know what this lancer did, Baron d’Ervy?  He swallowed some window-glass after pounding it down, and died in eleven hours, of an illness, in hospital.—­Try, if you please, to die of apoplexy, that we may not see you dishonored.”

Hulot looked with haggard eyes at the old warrior; and the Prince, reading the look which betrayed the coward, felt a flush rise to his cheeks; his eyes flamed.