“And why were you, then, so much horrified? Go, then, Billot, and cut throats also.”
“Oh, what are you now saying, Monsieur Gilbert?”
“Zounds! a man should be consistent. You came here, all pale, all trembling,—you, who are so brave, so strong,—and you said to me, ‘I am tired out.’ I laughed in your face, Billot; and now that I explain to you why you were pale, why you were worn out, it is you who laugh at me in turn.”
“Speak! Speak! but first of all give me the hope that I shall return cured, consoled, to my fields.”
“Your fields! Listen to me, Billot; all our hope is there. The country—a sleeping revolution, which wakes up once in a thousand years, and gives royalty the vertigo every time it awakens—the country will wake up in its turn, when the day snail come for purchasing or conquering those wrongly acquired territories of which you just now spoke, and with which the nobility and clergy are gorged, even to choking. But to urge on the country to a harvest of ideas, it will be necessary to urge on the countrymen to the conquest of the soil. Man, by becoming a proprietor, becomes free; and in becoming free, he becomes a better man. To us, then, privileged laborers, to whom God has consented that the veil of the future shall be raised; to us, then, the fearful work, which, after giving liberty to the people, shall give them the property of the soil! Here, Billot, will be a good work, and a sorry recompense perhaps; but an active, powerful work, full of joys and vexations, of glory and calumny. The country is still lulled in a dull, impotent slumber, but it waits only to be awakened by our summons, and that new dawn shall be our work. When once the country is awakened, the sanguinary portion of our labors will be terminated, and its peaceable labors, the labors of the country, will commence.”
“What, then, do you now advise that I should do, Monsieur Gilbert?”
“If you wish to be useful to your country, to the nation, to your brother men, to the world, remain here, Billot; take a hammer and work in this Vulcan’s furnace, which is forging thunders for the whole world.”
“Remain here to see men butchered, and perhaps at last learn to butcher them myself?”
“How so?” said Gilbert, with a faint smile. “You, Billot, become a murderer! What is it you are saying?”
“I say that should I remain here as you request me,” cried Billot, trembling with agitation,—”I say that the first man whom I shall see attaching a rope to a lamp-post, I will hang that man with these my hands.”
Gilbert’s smile became more positive.
“Well, now,” said he, “I find you understand me, and now you also are a murderer.”
“Yes; a murderer of vile wretches.”
“Tell me, Billot, you have seen De Losme, De Launay, De Flesselles, Foulon, and Berthier slaughtered?”
“Yes.”
“What epithet did those who slaughtered them apply to them?”
“They called them wretches.”
“Oh! that is true,” said Pitou; “they did call them wretches.”
“Yes; but it is I who am right, and not they,” rejoined Billot.
“You will be in the right,” said Gilbert, “if you hang them; but in the wrong, if they hang you.”
Billot hung down his head under this heavy blow: then suddenly raising it again, with dignity:-—
“Will you venture to maintain,” said he, “that those who assassinate defenceless men, and who are under the safeguard of public honor,—will you maintain that they are as good Frenchmen as I am?”
“Ah!” said Gilbert, “that is quite another question. Yes, in France we have several sorts of Frenchmen. First of all, we have the people, to which Pitou belongs, to which you belong, to which I belong; then we have the French clergy, and then the French nobility,—three classes of Frenchmen in France, each French in its own point of view; that is to say, as regards its own interests, and this without counting the King of France, who is also a Frenchman in his way. Ah, Billot, here you see, in these different modes of all these Frenchmen considering themselves French, the real secret of the Revolution. You will be a Frenchman in your own way; the Abbé Maury will be a Frenchman in his way; Mirabeau will be a Frenchman in a mode that differs from that of the Abbé Maury; and the king will be a Frenchman in another way than that of Mirabeau. Well, Billot, my excellent friend, thou man of upright heart and sound judgment, you have just entered upon the second part of the question which I am now engaged upon. Do me the pleasure, Billot, to cast your eyes on this.”