Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/37

Rh The sudden appearance of this quaint being seemed readily explicable. At the first sight of him several officers took him for a conscript or requisitionary (both of these terms were still in use) who had seen the halt made by the column and had fallen in with it. Nevertheless the man's arrival amazed the commandant strangely; for though there was not the slightest trace of alarm about him, he grew thoughtful. After a survey of the newcomer, he repeated his question mechanically, as if he were preoccupied with sinister thoughts.

"Yes, why don't they come up? Do you happen to know?"

His surly interlocutor answered with an accent which showed that he found it sufficiently difficult to express himself in French."Because," he said, stretching out his big, rough hand towards Ernée, "there lies Maine, and here Brittany ends," and he struck the ground heavily as he threw down the handle of his whip at the commandant's feet.

If a barbarous tomtom were suddenly struck in the middle of a piece of music, the impression produced would be very like the effect made upon the spectators of this scene by the stranger's concise speech. That word "speech" will scarcely give an idea of the hatred, the thirst for vengeance expressed in the scornful gesture and the brief word or two, or of the fierce and stern energy in the speaker's face. The extreme roughness of the man, who looked as though he had been hewn into shape by an axe, his gnarled skin, the lines of ignorant stupidity graven in every feature, gave him the look of a savage divinity. As he stood there in his prophetic attitude he looked like an embodied spirit of that Brittany which had just awakened from a three years' sleep to begin a struggle once more in which victory could never show her face save through a double veil of crape.

"There's a pretty image," said Hulot to himself. "To my mind, he looks like an envoy from folk who are about to open negotiations with powder and ball!"

When he had muttered these words between his teeth, the