"Crony," said the furrier, resuming a suspended conversation. "We are going to have troublous times in France. The Reformers are bestirring themselves.""If they triumph, it will only be after a long war, during which business will be at a standstill," said Lallier, incapable of rising higher than the commercial sphere.
"My father, who saw the wars between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs told me that our family would never have come out safely if one of his grandfathers--his mother's father--had not been a Goix, one of those famous butchers in the Market who stood by the Burgundians; whereas the other, the Lecamus, was for the Armagnacs; they seemed ready to flay each other alive before the world, but they were excellent friends in the family. So, let us both try to save Christophe; perhaps the time may come when he will save us.""You are a shrewd one," said the jeweller.
"No," replied Lecamus. "The burghers ought to think of themselves; the populace and the nobility are both against them. The Parisian bourgeoisie alarms everybody except the king, who knows it is his friend.""You who are so wise and have seen so many things," said Babette, timidly, "explain to me what the Reformers really want.""Yes, tell us that, crony," cried the jeweller. "I knew the late king's tailor, and I held him to be a man of simple life, without great talent; he was something like you; a man to whom they'd give the sacrament without confession; and behold! he plunged to the depths of this new religion,--he! a man whose two ears were worth all of a hundred thousand crowns apiece. He must have had secrets to reveal to induce the king and the Duchesse de Valentinois to be present at his torture.""And terrible secrets, too!" said the furrier. "The Reformation, my friends," he continued in a low voice, "will give back to the bourgeoisie the estates of the Church. When the ecclesiastical privileges are suppressed the Reformers intend to ask that the /vilain/ shall be imposed on nobles as well as on burghers, and they mean to insist that the king alone shall be above others--if indeed, they allow the State to have a king.""Suppress the Throne!" ejaculated Lallier.
"Hey! crony," said Lecamus, "in the Low Countries the burghers govern themselves with burgomasters of their own, who elect their own temporary head.""God bless me, crony; we ought to do these fine things and yet stay Catholics," cried the jeweller.
"We are too old, you and I, to see the triumph of the Parisian bourgeoisie, but it will triumph, I tell you, in times to come as it did of yore. Ha! the king must rest upon it in order to resist, and we have always sold him our help dear. The last time, all the burghers were ennobled, and he gave them permission to buy seignorial estates and take titles from the land without special letters from the king.
You and I, grandsons of the Goix through our mothers, are not we as good as any lord?"These words were so alarming to the jeweller and the two women that they were followed by a dead silence. The ferments of 1789 were already tingling in the veins of Lecamus, who was not yet so old but what he could live to see the bold burghers of the Ligue.
"Are you selling well in spite of these troubles?" said Lallier to Mademoiselle Lecamus.
"Troubles always do harm," she replied.
"That's one reason why I am so set on making my son a lawyer," said Lecamus; "for squabbles and law go on forever."The conversation then turned to commonplace topics, to the great satisfaction of the jeweller, who was not fond of either political troubles or audacity of thought.
