Though your head can never pay for Gerard's, I want it and I
shall have it. Adieu. I could drink with my own assassins, but I
cannot stay with those of my friend"; and he disappeared, leaving the
guests astonished at his coolness.
"Well, gentlemen, what do you think of the lawyers and surgeons and
bailiffs who manage the Republic," said the Gars, coldly.
"God's-death! marquis," replied the Comte de Bauvan; "they have
shocking manners; that fellow presumed to be impertinent, it seems to
me."
The captain's hasty retreat had a motive. The despised, humiliated
woman, who was even then, perhaps, being put to death, had so won upon
him during the scene of her degradation that he said to himself, as he
left the room, "If she is a prostitute, she is not an ordinary one,
and I'll marry her." He felt so sure of being able to rescue her from
the savages that his first thought, when his own life was given to
him, was to save hers. Unhappily, when he reached the portico, he
found the courtyard deserted. He looked about him, listened to the
silence, and could hear nothing but the distant shouts and laughter of
the Chouans, who were drinking in the gardens and dividing their
booty. He turned the corner to the fatal wing before which his men had
been shot, and from there he could distinguish, by the feeble light of
a few stray lanterns, the different groups of the Chasseurs du Roi.
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