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Updated: June 3, 2025
"Which one shall we kill?" asked Laroche. "Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly right. You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now they're there night and day, demons!"
When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he was rid of the living image of his own conscience. "Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?" asked Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related Vatel's attempt.
The latter was a man who scratched a living from day to day; he was one of the delinquents collected in Blangy under the sort of subscription invented by Sibilet and Courtecuisse to disgust the general by the results of his indictments.
"The general, the general!" sneered Courtecuisse; "they can do what they like with him. But it's Michaud who stirs him up, the mischief-maker! a fellow who don't know his business; in my day, things went differently." "Ah!" said Tonsard, "those were the good days for all of us weren't they, Vaudoyer?"
"That's true," said Courtecuisse; "none of the other land-owners complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied.
Courtecuisse was afraid to go to the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him. Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingratitude. In short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food decreased.
"It was Michaud's testimony which got her that." One Saturday evening, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Godain, Tonsard, his daughters, wife, and Pere Fourchon, also Vaudoyer and several mechanics were supping at the tavern. The moon was at half-full, the first snow had melted, and frost had just stiffened the ground so that a man's step left no traces.
"Well," said Laroche to Vaudoyer, "I tell you that if they make a single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall." "He has said it, old Laroche!" cried Courtecuisse. "He has said it," remarked Vaudoyer, "but he hasn't done it, and he won't do it. What good would it do to get yourself guillotined for some gendarme or other? No, if you kill, I say, kill Michaud."
These wearing anxieties had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of poison or with some chronic malady. "What's the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue tied?" asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told him about the battle which had just taken place.
He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant workers like Courtecuisse succumb.
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