“Oh, you can fight if you want to,” replied Corentin. “From what that girl has dropped, close-mouthed as you think she is, I can tell you that you’ll have to skirmish about, and I myself will give you the pleasure of an interview with the Gars before long.”
“How so?” asked Hulot, moving back a step to get a better view of this strange individual.
“Mademoiselle de Verneuil is in love with him,” replied Corentin, in a thick voice, “and perhaps he loves her. A marquis, a knight of Saint-Louis, young, brilliant, perhaps rich,--what a list of temptations! She would be foolish indeed not to look after her own interests and try to marry him rather than betray him. The girl is attempting to fool us. But I saw hesitation in her eyes. They probably have a rendezvous; perhaps they’ve met already. Well, to-morrow I shall have him by the forelock. Yesterday he was nothing more than the enemy of the Republic, to-day he is mine; and I tell you this, every man who has been so rash as to come between that girl and me has died upon the scaffold.”
So saying, Corentin dropped into a reverie which hindered him from observing the disgust on the face of the honest soldier as he discovered the depths of this intrigue, and the mechanism of the means employed by Fouche. Hulot resolved on the spot to thwart Corentin in every way that did not conflict essentially with the success of the government, and to give the Gars a fair chance of dying honorably, sword in hand, before he could fall a prey to the executioner, for whom this agent of the detective police acknowledged himself the purveyor.
“If the First Consul would listen to me,” thought Hulot, as he turned his back on Corentin, “he would leave those foxes to fight aristocrats, and send his solders on other business.”
Corentin looked coldly after the old soldier, whose face had brightened at the resolve, and his eyes gleamed with a sardonic expression, which showed the mental superiority of this subaltern Machiavelli.
“Give an ell of blue cloth to those fellows, and hang a bit of iron at their waists,” he said to himself, “and they’ll think there’s but one way to kill people.” Then, after walking up and down awhile very slowly, he exclaimed suddenly, “Yes, the time has come, that woman shall be mine! For five years I’ve been drawing the net round her, and I have her now; with her, I can be a greater man in the government than Fouche himself. Yes, if she loses the only man she has ever loved, grief will give her to me, body and soul; but I must be on the watch night and day.”