So saying, he burst into a gruff peal of laughter, while the flesh of his hearers crept. After this agreeable pleasantry, Dr. Lorquin said gravely:
"Hullin, your ears should be cut off! When the country was to be defended, was I to be forgotten? It seems to me that a surgeon might be useful here, although may God send you no need of one!"
"Pardon me, doctor; it was my fault," replied Hullin, pressing his hand. "For the last week I have had so many things to think of that some escaped me, in spite of myself. But a man like you need not be called upon by me to do his duty."
"It is all well and good," he cried; "but by your fault I am here late. But where is your general? I will complain to him."
"Surgeon-in-chief of the partisans of the Vosges. Very good, Jean-Claude." And, approaching the wagon in which Catherine was seated, the doctor told her that he relied upon her to organize the hospital department.
"Very well," she answered; "forward. You dine with us, doctor."
The wagon started, and all the way the brave doctor laughingly told Catherine how the news of the rising reached him; how his old house-keeper Marie was wild with grief, and tried to keep him from going to be massacred by the Kaiserliks; the different episodes of his journey from Quibolo to the village of Charmes. Hullin and Materne and his sons marched a few paces in the rear, their rifles on their shoulders; and thus they reached the farm of Bois-de-Chênes.
Man is made for truth. The ray of intelligence beaming from his countenance and kindling his looks with life marks his superiority over all inferior creation, and loudly proclaims this fact. Intelligence must have an object; and what can this object be but truth? As a necessary consequence from this fact, it follows that error can be nothing else than fragments of truth; ill-assorted, improperly joined together. Error does not consist in what logicians call simple ideas, or self-evident propositions; but in complex ideas, the result of a long chain of syllogisms. Another consequence, closely allied to the first, is, that the greater the error, the more universal and more widely spread, the more particular truths it must contain. Or, if it does not contain a greater number of partial truths, it must have the power of apparently satisfying a real and prevalent tendency of our mind, otherwise it would never exert dominion over the intelligence; or else it must possess the secret of awakening and alluring a true and imperative aspiration of our nature.