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Updated: June 28, 2025
To prevent interruption, the Austrians must be occupied, and Generals Fouchet and Roguet will therefore post batteries of fifty cannon and bomb-proof storehouses for ammunition, in order not only to keep the enemy from the left bank, but also to drive him out of all the islands in the Danube. You will all take care to execute my orders with the utmost rapidity and punctiliousness.
We had seen the world; the effect of that experience was to produce the common result there was a fine deposit of discontent in the cup of our pleasure. Madame Fouchet had made use of our absence to settle our destiny; she had rented her villa. This was one of the bitter dregs.
But courtesy is his costume de bal; he can only afford to don his bravest attire of smiles and graciousness when his pocket is in holiday mood. Madame Fouchet we found in full ball-room toilet; she was wreathed in smiles. Would ces dames give themselves the trouble of entering? would they see the house or the garden first? would they permit their trunks to be sent for?
It was absurdly, ridiculously out of repair; its gaping beams and the sunken, dejected floor could only be due to intentional neglect. Fouchet evidently had grasped the secrets of the laws of contrast; the deflected angle of the tumbling roof made the clean-cut garden beds doubly true.
We found it, indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the soul of a Maecenas; he knew how to arrange a feast of roses.
Pity, however, would have been entirely wasted on the Fouchet household and their change of habitation.
The Abbé Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But the corruption and apostasy of the hierarchy as a whole, and their betrayal of the people, had borne its acrid fruit of popular contempt and hostility, and the fanaticism of the worship of Reason answered the fanaticism of the Cross.
"Ah, mesdames, what will you have? The French peasant is like that. When he is in a rage nothing stops him he beats anything, everything; whatever his hand encounters must suffer when he is angry; his wife, his child, his servant, his horse, they are all alike to him when he sees red." Monsieur Fouchet was tying up his rose-trees; we were watching him from our seat on the green bench.
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