He seated
himself by the roadside, drew from his smock a few pieces of thin,
black buckwheat-bread,--a national delicacy, the dismal delights of
which none but a Breton can understand,--and began to eat with stolid
indifference. There seemed such a total absence of all human
intelligence about the man that the officers compared him in turn to
the cattle browsing in the valley pastures, to the savages of America,
or the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope. Deceived by
his behavior, the commandant himself was about to turn a deaf ear to
his own misgivings, when, casting a last prudence glance on the man
whom he had taken for the herald of an approaching carnage, he
suddenly noticed that the hair, the smock, and the goatskin leggings
of the stranger were full of thorns, scraps of leaves, and bits of
trees and bushes, as though this Chouan had lately made his way for a
long distance through thickets and underbrush. Hulot looked
significantly at his adjutant Gerard who stood beside him, pressed his
hand firmly, and said in a low voice: "We came for wool, but we shall
go back sheared."
The officers looked at each other silently in astonishment.
It is necessary here to make a digression, or the fears of the
commandant will not be intelligible to those stay-at-home persons who
are in the habit of doubting everything because they have seen
nothing, and who might therefore deny the existence of Marche-a-Terre
and the peasantry of the West, whose conduct, in the times we are
speaking of, was often sublime.
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