Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/38

14 commandant's eyes traveled from the man before him over the landscape, from the landscape to the detachment, from the detachment over the steep slopes on either side of the way with the tall gorse-bushes of Brittany shading their summits, and thence he suddenly turned upon the stranger, whom he submitted to a mute examination, ending it at last by asking him sharply:

"Where do you come from?"

His keen, piercing eyes were trying to read the secret thoughts beneath the inscrutable face before him, a face which had meantime resumed the usual expression of vacuous stolidity that envelops a peasant's face in repose.

"From the country of the gars," the man answered, without a trace of apprehension.

"Your name?"

"Marche-à-Terre."

"What makes you call yourself by your Chouan nickname? It is against the law."

Marche-à-Terre, as he called himself, gaped at the commandant with such a thoroughly genuine appearance of imbecility, that the soldier thought his remark was not understood.

"Are you part of the Fougères requisition?"

To this question Marche-à-Terre replied with an "I don't know," in that peculiarly hopeless fashion which puts a stop to all conversation. He sat himself down quietly at the roadside, drew from his blouse some slices of a thin dark bannock made of buckwheat meal, the staple food of Brittany, a melancholy diet in which only a Breton can take delight, and began to eat with wooden imperturbability.

He looked so absolutely devoid of every kind of intelligence, that the officers compared him as he sat first to one of the cattle browsing in the pasture land below, next to an American Indian, and lastly to some aboriginal savage at the Cape of Good Hope. Even the commandant himself was deceived by his attitude, and heeded his fears no longer, till by way of making assurance surer still he gave a last