Buonaparte closed his eyes. He now talked of his health and his wounds, consulted his watch, and went away.
"I will wager," said the man in the waistcoats, "that the general is running after the minister; he will apologise for having been here and pretend that he is our leader."
"Let us now deliberate, gentlemen," said the president, after the sleepy servants had finished bringing and lighting new candles. Let us leave off trying to persuade each other. Let us think of the contents of the note which will be read by our friends outside in forty-eight hours from now. We have heard ministers spoken of. Now that M. de Nerval has left us, we are at liberty to say 'what we do care for ministers.'"
The cardinal gave a subtle smile of approval.
"Nothing is easier it seems to me than summing up our position," said the young bishop of Agde, with the restrained concentrated fire of the most exalted fanaticism. He had kept silent up to this time; his eye, which Julien had noticed as being soft and calm at the beginning, had become fiery during the first hour of the discussion. His soul was now bubbling over like lava from Vesuvius.
"England only made one mistake from 1806 to 1814," he said, "and that was in not taking direct and personal measures against Napoleon. As soon as that man had made dukes and chamberlains, as soon as he had re-established the throne, the mission that God had entrusted to him was finished. The only thing to do with him was to sacrifice him. The scriptures teach us in more than one place how to make an end of tyrants" (at this point there were several Latin quotations).
"To-day, gentlemen, it is not a man who has to be sacrificed, it is Paris. What is the use of arming your five hundred men in each department, a hazardous and interminable enterprise? What is the good of involving France in a matter which is personal to Paris? Paris alone has done the evil, with its journals and it salons. Let the new Babylon perish.
"We must bring to an end the conflict between the church and Paris. Such a catastrophe would even be in the worldly interests of the throne. Why did not Paris dare to whisper a word under Buonaparte? Ask the cannon of Saint-Roch?"
