“Ah, you are going to reply,” said the Abbé Fortier, trusting to annihilate Pitou by raillery.
“Yes; and tell me if I am not right. You call me traitor, and refuse me the arms I asked you for peaceably, but which I now take in the name, and by the strong hand, of the law. Well, Abbé, I had rather be called traitor to my master than, like you, have opposed the liberty of my country. Our country forever!”
The maire nodded to Pitou as he previously had to the abbé.
The effect of this address ruined the abbé.
The maire disappeared.
So too would the adjunct, but the absence of the two chiefs would certainly have been remarked.
He then, with the gendarmes and Pitou, who was perfectly familiar with the locale in which he had grown up, proceeded to the museum.
Sebastian rushed after the patriots; the other children appeared amazed.
After the door was opened, the abbé sank, half-dead with mortification and rage, on the first chair.
When once in the museum, Pitou’s assistants wished to pillage everything, but the honesty of the commandant restrained them.
He took only thirty-three muskets, for he commanded thirty-three National Guards.
As it might be necessary for him some day to fire a shot, he took, as a thirty-fourth, an officer’s gun, lighter and shorter than the others, which was adapted for shooting hares and rabbits as well as for killing either a false Frenchman or a true Prussian.
He then selected a straight sword like Lafayette’s, which had perhaps been borne by some hero at Fontenoy or Philipsbourg. He buckled it on.
Each of his colleagues then placed twelve muskets on his shoulder, and both were so delighted that they scarcely felt the enormous weight.
Pitou took the rest.
They passed through the park, to avoid observation in going through the city.
It was also the shortest route.
Another advantage of this road was that they had no chance of meeting any of the partisans of the opposite faction. Pitou was not afraid of a battle, and the musket he had chosen inspired him with still greater courage; but Pitou had become a man of reflection, and he reflected that though one musket was a powerful weapon of defence for a man, a load of muskets could hardly be said to be so.
Our three heroes, loaded with their spoils, passed rapidly through the park, and reached the rendezvous. Exhausted and heated, they took their precious prize that night to Pitou’s house. It may be the country had been too hasty in confiding it to them.
There was a meeting of the guard that night, and Pitou gave them the muskets, saying, in the words of the Spartan mother:—
“With them or on them.”
Thus was the little commune, by the genius of Pitou, made to seem as busy as an ant-hill during an earthquake.
Delight at possessing a gun among a people poachers by nature, whom the long oppression of gamekeepers had incensed, could not but be great. Pitou consequently became a god on earth. His long legs and arms were forgotten. So too were his clumsy knees and his grotesque antecedents. He could not but be the tutelary god of the country.
The next day was passed by the enthusiasts in cleaning and repairing their arms. Some rejoiced that the cock worked well, and others repaired the springs of the lock or replaced the screws.
In the mean time, Pitou had retired to his room, as Agamemnon did to his tent, brightening his brains as others did their guns.
What was Pitou thinking of?
Pitou, become a leader of the people, was thinking of the hollowness of earthly grandeur.
The time had come when the whole edifice he had erected was about to crumble.
The guns had been issued on the evening before, and the day passed in putting them in order. On the next day he would have to drill his men, and Pitou did not know a single command of, “Load, in twelve times.”
What is the use of a commandant ignorant of the drill? The writer of these lines never knew but one so ignorant. He was, however, a countryman of Pitou.