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It became the fashion to keep birds, plait nets, shoot arrows, and crow like a cock in Monsieur Jean Servien's class-room.
He was recalled from far, far away by his aunt shouting up the stairs: "Jean! Jean! come down into the shop; your father wants you." A stout, red-faced man, with the bent shoulders that come of much stooping over the desk, sat beside the counter. Monsieur Servien's eyes rested on his face with a deprecating air.
"He has poisoned him. Take him before the court martial." "Shoot him right away. He's an assassin; the Versaillais have sent him." "Off with him to the lock-up!" Servien's denials and struggles were in vain. Again and again he protested: "You can see for yourselves he's drunk and asleep!" "Listen to him he is insulting the sovereign people." "Pitch him in the river!" "Swing him on a lamp-post."
Tasso, Novara, and the diva so beloved of cardinals mingled confusedly in Jean Servien's heated brain, and in a burst of sublime if fuddled enthusiasm he wrung the old villain's hand. Everything had grown indistinct; he seemed to be swimming in an element of molten metal. Monsieur Tudesco, who at the moment was imbibing a glass of kümmel, pointed to his waistcoat of ticking.
There is near by a decent establishment where we can converse as two philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated you in the Latin rudiments." They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away.
Hatred of the Empire which had left him to rot in a back-shop and a school class-room, love of the Republic that was to bring every blessing in its train had, since the proclamation of September 4, raised Jean Servien's warlike enthusiasm to fever heat. But he soon wearied of the long drills in the Luxembourg gardens and the hours of futile sentry-go behind the fortifications.
The village street ran upwards between low walls, brambles and thistles lining the roadway on either side. In front the woods melted into a far-off blue haze; below him stretched the city, with its river, its roofs, its towers and domes, the vast, smoky town which had kindled Servien's aspirations at the flaring lights of its theatres and nurtured his feverish longings in the dust of its streets.
The men finished him with their bayonets; then the woman danced on the corpse with yells of joy. The fighting was coming closer. A well-sustained fire swept the Quai. The woman was the last to go. Jean Servien's body lay stretched in the empty roadway.
Durut was the convict; the Damocles' sword hung over Prudence Servien's head. But for these details, many critics would have thought Europe's attachment somewhat grotesque. And no one could have understood the startling announcement that Carlos had ready. "Yes, my girl, you can go back to Valenciennes. Here, read this."
And disgust was the thing of all others Servien's delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. His morality was shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined perversions, romantic crimes.
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